Waiting to board my next flight on my annual journey to Holdrege, Nebraska, pop. 5,515.
This will be my 12th time as the Computer Science instructor for their high school "Summer Honors Program," which is now in its 47th year!
Taking a page out of @pluralistic's many books,, this is going to be a Long thread. (Sorry to name drop you, you've just given me so many great ideas!)
English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing died #OTD in 1954.
During World War II, he played a crucial role in deciphering the Enigma code used by the German military, significantly contributing to the Allied war effort. In his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," he proposed the famous Turing Test as a criterion for determining whether a machine can exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.
Alan Turing submits On Computable Numbers for publication.
Turing's proof shows that there can be no mechanical, general method (i.e., a Turing machine or a program in some equivalent model of computation) to determine whether algorithms halt. However, each individual instance of the halting problem has a definitive answer, which may or may not be practically computable.
“AI systems threaten to amplify social injustice, erode social stability, enable large-scale criminal activity, and facilitate automated warfare, customized mass manipulation, and pervasive surveillance..”
“AI systems threaten to amplify social injustice, erode social stability, enable large-scale criminal activity, and facilitate automated warfare, customized mass manipulation, and pervasive surveillance..”
“AI systems threaten to amplify social injustice, erode social stability, enable large-scale criminal activity, and facilitate automated warfare, customized mass manipulation, and pervasive surveillance..”
A team of computer manufacturers, users, & university people led by Grace Hopper meets to discuss the creation of a new programming language that would be called COBOL.
Throughout her career, Hopper made significant contributions to computer science, including the development of the concept of machine-independent programming languages, which greatly facilitated software development. Her compiler converted English terms into machine code understood by computers.
Fascinating article from IEEE Spectrum that discusses the carbon footprint of software and how we can both measure and improve it: https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-software
The benefit is not only less carbon, but following some of the principles that are outlined can decrease costs and improve efficiency.
The article references tools such as Firefox Profiler and Ecograder as well as an open source Sustainable Software Engineering course.
This isn't an original idea, but I needed to get it out of my brain. There are many different definitions of what "Open Source". We can have a lovely argument over a pint as to whether GPLv3 is too open or if a licence which hasn't been validated by the OSI counts. But, more fundamentally, […]
Do you, or have you ever, used a graphical user interface? If you use #Windows, #macOS, or any version of #Linux with a window manager or desktop environment, you can thank Dr. Clarence "Skip" Ellis.
Dr. Ellis worked at Xerox PARC, the research organization that developed the modern GUI. Icons, windows, the mouse, Ethernet-based networking, laser printing - all of these (and more) came out of PARC. Dr. Ellis led the team that created Officetalk, the first program to use icons and the Internet. He got his start at 15 years old showing a local tech company how to reuse punch cards, which was a game-changer back in 1958.
Oh, and he was also the first black man to earn a PhD in Computer Science.