Human Interaction with Technology and Information

Project title        Eval A    Eval B
Sarit’s project        2    1
Polling            4    2
Video Games        2    4
Baseball Stats        1
Buying            3
YouTube            4    3
Target Audience        3    2
Ticketmaster        1    4
Baseball Pay        1    2
Movie Monologues        4
Listening Trends        3
AOL Stalker        3
Banned Substances    1
Ebay            4
Vehicle MPG        3    2
RateMyProfessor        1

Today’s office hour will be from 3:40pm-4:20pm. Sorry for the late notice.

Due to a department meeting at lunchtime today, today’s office hour will be rescheduled. I will be in my office from 10:15-10:45 and from 3:45-4:30.

Allow Editing

Crazy Images

List E-mail Links

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 7, 2007

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2367/exposing-computer-science-to-the-wider-world

Exposing Computer Science to the Wider World

Although supercomputers have the potential to make significant discoveries in a variety of subject areas, they are often limited in their application because of computer scientists’ ignorance of subjects other than computer science, presenters at the National Science Foundation supercomputer symposium said on Thursday.

Russ Miller, a professor of computer science and engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said university computer-science departments need to recruit graduate students who have undergraduate degrees in diverse fields, such as biology, physics, and humanities. Currently, most computer-science students know a lot about computer science, he said, but not much else.

“They don’t have a broad enough worldview of what they’re doing computer science for,” he said. “So they’re just interested in building the next best computer-science widget and hope somebody is interested in that.”

John Sasso, who works for the New York State Office of Technology, said computer-science departments needed to take students with diverse skills and use them to think creatively when solving problems. It’s too often, he said, that universities teach students how to create a computer program to solve a problem, but not how to identify the problem in the first place.

“Students are being taught to solve things in more of a recipe kind of fashion,” he said.

Install and take a look at the following two software programs:

• Irfanview [www.irfanview.com]
• AXE editor [On the K: drive for this course, in the reserve folder]

On Monday, we’ll talk about this assignment. Be prepared to share observations and/or questions with the class. Your contributions can be about any aspect of the assignment: the installation, the purpose or value of these programs or software like this, features of these programs, or anything else connected to the interaction of people (you) with the software.