The PC Informant » Education

Debating how to draw talent into technical fields

Vic Laurie — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:40:35 +0000

The US is graduating fewer and fewer scientists and engineers, and concern is growing about how to deal with the falloff. TechCrunch has posted a debate between two experts on the best approach to attracting more talent.

While many people agree this is a problem, not everyone agrees on what should be done about it. Former Intel chairman and CEO Craig Barrett is a strong proponent of priming the pump with more undergraduate science, engineering, and math students. Duke/UC-Berkeley professor (and regular TechCrunch columnist) Vivek Wadhwa thinks that better rewards for people who pursue engineering and science degrees is the right approach. So we asked Barrett and Wadhwa to debate the issue of how best to fix technology education in the U.S.

Princeton report card on Kindle in the classroom

Vic Laurie — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:06:56 +0000

Princeton University has been using Amazon’s Kindle in the classroom as an experiment. An assessment has been posted and the results are mixed:

Managers of Princeton University’s semester-long pilot of the Amazon KindleDX electronic reader are calling the project a success, with results showing that student participants reduced the amount of paper they used to print course readings by almost 50 percent. However, e-readers must be significantly improved to have the same value in a teaching environment as traditional paper texts, participants said.

Students and faculty surveyed this month at the conclusion of the pilot expressed appreciation for the e-reader’s portability — and the fact that it almost eliminated the printing and photocopying they did for their pilot courses — but they also said the ability to highlight directly on traditional text, to take notes and flip pages for ease in navigation suffers in the e-reader.

University lectures on the Internet

Vic Laurie — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:15:32 +0000

You can stay right at home and still enjoy hearing lectures from some of the best minds in the world. Many top-ranked universities are placing material on the Internet. I mention this from time to time because I think it is an opportunity you shouldn’t miss. Here are some more links:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
One of the great engineering and technology schools of the world.
Yale University
My ties are to Harvard and Princeton but Yale is a pretty good school too.
University of California, Berkeley
One of the great public universities.
The Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton)
Where Einstein used to hang out.

Lectures by Richard Feynman

Vic Laurie — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:14:45 +0000

This post hasn’t much to do with computers and I hope you’ll forgive me this personal indulgence. It’s about some online lectures by the famous physicist Richard Feynman. Feynman was already a legend in scientific circles when I was a graduate student. He wasn’t a personal acquaintance but I did attend several of his presentations at physics conferences and encountered him briefly several times. His acuity at analyzing problems was shown to the public when he put his finger on the cause of the space shuttle Challenger disaster.

Feynman was not only a truly original thinker but also a fine teacher and the books from his undergraduate physics lectures at CalTech are a staple of physics education. Fortunately for posterity, some lectures he gave at Cornell were filmed. Bill Gates and Microsoft have made them available online in an interactive and augmented format. There is also a Web site devoted to his famous undergraduate lectures.

Site for bird lovers

Vic Laurie — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:54:36 +0000

When I was young I was an avid bird watcher. Limited mobility now puts a crimp in such activity but I can still enjoy birds through Web sites such as the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. You can enjoy the sounds of birds at a number of sites but Cornell has an extensive collection of clips of bird songs. Another collection is at the State University of NY at Stony Brook. This site also has an extensive list of other sites with bird songs.

The world of learning at your fingertips

Vic Laurie — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:21:07 +0000

One of the rich resources on the Internet is the collection of free university courses that are available. Open Culture lists 250 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. This is only one example of the revolution in the availability of knowledge. In his Computerworld blog, Mike Elgan discusses how the spread of knowledge is changing the world:

There’s little doubt that the growing availability of books and periodical content — at low or no cost — will change the spread of knowledge. The combination of inexpensive storage, digital formats, mass-scanning projects and improved search capabilities will transform our world in ways we can’t imagine.

The dangers of tailoring your news

Vic Laurie — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:18:23 +0000

A lot of people use some form of aggregator to collect Internet stories and posts on those subjects that concern them. And that’s all they read. At first it sounds like a good idea; tailor your searches and news sources to reflect your particular interests. There’s just too much information on the Internet so aggregating and reading only those things that you are interested in will serve you better, right?

Personally, I don’t think so. How are you ever going to learn about new things if you only read about what you already know? I can’t count how many times I have discovered something new and useful just by serendipity or how many times I have come across an item that made me exclaim, “I didn’t know that”. That’s the advantage of reading a newspaper like the New York Times or looking through wide-based professional journals like Nature. I’m not saying that aggregators aren’t extremely usful; I use one to help with this blog. It’s the problem of relying solely on tailored sources that concerns me.

Internet safety to be taught in British schools

Vic Laurie — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:03:30 +0000

In a move that other countries should follow, the British are going to teach Internet safety to school children. Neowin reports:

Lessons in how to use the Internet safely are to become a compulsory part of primary school education in England from 2011. Drawn up by the new UK Council on Child Internet Safety, the plans will also encourage children to follow an online “Green Cross Code”.

The campaign, called “Zip it, Block it, Flag it” aims to encourage children to not give out personal details online, to block unwanted messages on social networks and to report inappropriate behaviour to an appropriate person or organisation, such as the website, a teacher or the police. Although the campaign is intended for schools, retailers and social networks, it will be up to them how they use it.

How your CPU works

Vic Laurie — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:28:34 +0000

This won’t be everybody’s cup of tea but, if you are curious about how a computer does what it does, here’s a link that explains how the arithmetic unit of a CPU works.

In simplest terms, a computer is an adding machine together with simple logic functions that can choose different operations depending on whether one electrical signal is bigger than another. Amazingly enough, adding/subtracting plus simple logic functions and a stored program are all that is needed to carry out the enormous array of tasks that computers do today. Of course, it takes a lot of clever programming to put together all the steps needed and it takes modern hardware to do the many millions of additions and subtractions that even a simple task requires. Mathematical whizzes like Alan Turing and John von Neumann laid the theoretical foundations and the integrated circuit made the hardware possible.

Attenborough nature films online

Vic Laurie — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:39:05 +0000

The naturalist David Attenborough has been making excellent TV programs for BBC for years. Now his selection of 50 of his most memorable natural history moments is available on the Web. A description of some of the material is at this BBC blog.