Industry talk

This isn't strictly related to Computing for Ordinary Mortals, but in case any readers are interested in what a college professor does...

These slides were for a presentation to an industry partner, about the work that goes on in my research lab.

How to avoid programming (OUP)

What does a computer scientist do? You might expect that we spend a lot of our time programming, and this sometimes happens, for some of us. When I spend a few weeks or even months building a software system, the effort can be enormously fun and satisfying. But most of the time, what I actually do is a bit different. Here’s an example from my past work, related to the idea of computational thinking.

Imagine you have a new robot in your home. You haven’t yet figured out all of its capabilities, so you mainly use it for sentry duty; it rolls from room to room while you’re not at home, turning lights and appliances on and off, perhaps checking for fires or burglaries.

Read the rest on the OUPblog, "Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World."

The Big Idea (Whatever)

When I was ten years old or so, I saw a battered paperback copy of Triplanetary on my grandfather’s bookshelf. I borrowed it… and found myself in ten-year-old heaven. Science fiction led me to popular science, with Isaac Asimov (and Edgar Cayce, embarrassingly enough) to help me cross the boundary. I read about physics, space, biology, math, and psychology. It was formative reading. Today I’m a computer scientist, and I’ve just written my own book.

The big idea in Computing for Ordinary Mortals is that the basics of computer science can be conveyed through stories. Not stories about computers and how we use them, but stories about other kinds of everyday things we do. Computing is more about abstract concepts than about hardware or software, and we can understand these concepts through analogies to what happens in the real world.

Read the rest in a Big Ideas post on John Scalzi's Whatever blog.

Computational thinking about politics (HuffPo)

On The Atlantic Wire Gabriel Snyder gives what we'd call a combinatorial analysis of the presidential election. I like the analysis not for what it says about the possible outcome but because it illustrates an influential idea in computer science, called computational thinking: formulating a problem so that it can be solved by an information-processing agent. Here's how it works in this situation.

Read the rest on the Huffington Post.

A computer science reading list

In writing Computing for Ordinary Mortals, I had to think about where to point readers who might want more depth in each of the topics I wrote about. The result (in the Further Reading sections and end notes) is a reading list for someone who would like to come up to speed in computer science. My choices are biased, of course (a systems person would have more to say about architecture, operating systems, and networking), but I think they're plausible overall.

Computing for Ordinary Mortals: Errata

I wonder if it's possible to publish a book that doesn't contain errors? These are fixes for Computing for Ordinary Mortals. So far.

Page 90: The indentation of the last line in the algorithm, "Output the number 32...", should match the indentation of the second line, "Do the following..."

Page 222: It's Butler Lampson. (Thanks to Jon Doyle for catching my mistake.)

Computing for Ordinary Mortals has arrived

A couple of weeks ago a Federal Express envelope arrived at my house: it was a copy of my book, from Oxford. Last week a box arrived, and I knew what to expect: twenty more copies for friends and family.

And now I'm told that Computing for Ordinary Mortals is shipping from Amazon.

I'm excited. So what do I do now? I tell you about what I've written... (shortly.)

Science, Engineering, and Innovation (HuffPo)

We all know in our heads that science, engineering, and the work of creative people influence our everyday lives. But sometimes it feels more personal.

Chad Ruble's mother had a stroke some years ago and was left with aphasia. According to the National Aphasia Association, about 1 million Americans have aphasia, an impairment of the ability to process language -- in speaking and listening, and usually also in reading and writing. Today's networks can connect us with almost everyone else in the world, but for people with severe aphasia, more is needed. Ordinary phone conversation and email pose challenges.

Read the rest on the Huffington Post.

Computer programming is the new literacy (OUP)

It’s widely held that computer programming is the new literacy. (Disagreement can be found, even among computing professionals, but it’s not nearly as common.) It’s an effective analogy. We all agree that everyone should be literate, and we might see a natural association between writing letters for people to read and writing programs for computers to carry out. We also find a historical parallel to the pre-Gutenberg days, when written communication was the purview mainly of the aristocracy and professional scribes. Computation is an enormously valuable resource, and we’re only beginning to explore the implications of its being inexpensively and almost universally available.

But is programming-as-literacy an appropriate analogy? We tend to think that basic literacy is achieved by someone who can say, “Yes, I can read and write.” Let’s see what this means in the context of programming.

Read the rest on the OUPblog, "Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World."

Code Year: Why You Should Learn to Code (HuffPo)

You probably know about Code Year. Code Year, sponsored by Codecademy, challenges people to learn how to program in 2012. The Codeacademy website offers free online lessons in a variety of programming languages; it's received attention in the press and saw a large boost from a comment from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Twitter: "My New Year's resolution is to learn to code with Codecademy in 2012! Join me."

Hundreds of thousands of people have joined Bloomberg. Even though my own Code Year was 30 years ago, I can still appreciate the appeal -- you'll learn how to write software to make your computer do new and wonderful things that youfind valuable, instead of depending only on what others have done. That's empowering.

But there's more.

Read the rest on the Huffington Post.