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eldina | 14 years ago | on: Damn Cool Algorithms: Fountain Codes

This is useful, novel, and certainly non-obvious stuff.

So you would like to have had eg. any useful non-obvious algorithm or data structure which at some point in history was novel been patented ? Yikes.

eldina | 14 years ago | on: Order theory for computer scientists

As a toy example showing that knowing even just basic ideas and techniques from this area can be useful, play around with designing a purely functional algorithm for the Stable Marriage Problem. Please report back if you come up with something efficient :) Of course, we would have to agree on the target audience to make sense of what useful means.

eldina | 14 years ago | on: Try Clojure in your browser

Linux + Opera here: After one has inputted a fifth line, the window will scroll to the top whenever one presses a key to type a statement.

I appreciate the effort by people creating repls for various languages. It was a similar repl for Haskell that was my entry point into Haskell and the wonderful world of functional programming.

eldina | 14 years ago | on: Experts often end up where they started as beginners

I did not like that quote. For the first part: Beginners absolutely do not play be ear unless he by playing by ear means: Make instrument produce note. Continue by trial and error until complete string of notes resembles desired tune. There is a difference between "doodling" on your instrument and playing by ear. The last part: "they realize that music really is about what you hear and not what you see" is just fluff. And sheet music can just be played and sound good, this is dependent on the skill level of who is playing it. It is like saying code can only be well written after it has been refactored.

eldina | 14 years ago | on: Real world Clojure

It would be interesting to see an explicit example of

"In the area of query planning and optimization, I found that at some point I hit a wall with what I could do in Java. There was latent abstraction that I understood but could not express in the code."

eldina | 14 years ago | on: Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).

There is a huge difference between Denmark and Finland both in the quality of the education a coming elementary school teacher goes through and perhaps more important in the level of applicants that are accepted for the education. In 2010 for many of the schools in Denmark where you can become a teacher there were no requirements on your grades from "gymnasiet" (equivalent of high school), you only had to have passed gymnasiet. In Denmark, coming teachers choose 2 or 3 subjects that will be there main subjects. For these subjects there are some requirements, unfortunately these are ridiculously low. In gymnasiet all subjects have a level A, B or C which indicates how deeply the subject is covered. Some subjects eg. Danish and history are mandatory and exists only in the highest level A form while others eg. languages, biology, physics, math, exist in usually at least two of the levels and depending on your choice of line you can choose different levels with the requirement that when finishing you must have had 2 non-mandatory A level subjects. To choose eg. nature & technique, a subject supposed to encompass physics, chemistry, biology and geography, as one of your main subjects when becoming an elementary school teacher, it is sufficient to have the medium grade in just a single of a list of subjects that are related to natural sciences and this only had to be on the middle B level.

Another problem is that until 2007 the "seminars", the schools for educating teachers, were mainly relics from the late sixties, this having all the obvious implications given the hippie state of DK in those years.

Also in DK through all levels of the educational system from elementary school through university, the main focus is on the students who are at the bottom of the skill spectrum.

eldina | 14 years ago | on: Enrollment for Stanford's online DB class now open

Is it clear whether these open courses will be repeated in the future or if they are mainly tests before starting to charge ? It is wonderful that they are freely available but can it really be a permanent thing and what does Stanford gain ?

eldina | 14 years ago | on: Facebook is scaring me

Life is fine without Dorkbook. Never used it and hopefully never will, although it is getting harder and harder as my school has started to actively use it for e.g. communication regarding potential jobs for students and graduates in companies and institutions the school cooperates with.

eldina | 14 years ago | on: Category Theory for Dummies [pdf]

I think category theory is rarely essentially used in a first or second typical course on some topic in math. Once in a while if students can be assumed to have had a course in category theory, then it is more elegant and efficient e.g. simply to show that some functor has an adjoint hence this or that limit is preserved, but to me category theory, except if it is the main topic of interest, is useful because it eases communication and allows you to quickly get some understanding of a construction that might look very "local" to some category that you are not familiar with. Unlike the person who created the cited notes, I think it actually can help understanding the things under study or the associated constructions, assuming sufficient command of category theory. I remember when I first understood the definitions of things like products, coproducts, push-outs and pull- backs etc. in my last year as an undergraduate. Suddenly, for many of the constructions from topology and algebra it became easier to remember them, how they were constructed and which properties they had. To me it is kind of like with design patterns, mainly I don't use them as tools picked up from my tool box when solving a problem, rather they simply allow me to communicate more easily and gives me another level of abstraction where I can reuse thinking I have done earlier.

eldina | 14 years ago | on: A resume template in TeX

Are you sure you have enough data to make 1) a fact ?

I doubt that anyone but very, very few, writes resumes in TeX. LaTeX, yes some. TeX ? Nah.

Someone in command of LaTeX, can make a CV look essentially like whatever they want, so 1) is perhaps not as "usually" as you think.

Regarding 2), what, if anything, do you conclude about an applicant's level of geekiness if you believe you have identified their resume as having been written in Word ?

If you really use this strategy and you are a hiring manager in an area related to technology or computing/programming, someone should seriously consider if it is to their advantage having you involved in the hiring process.

eldina | 14 years ago | on: The Three Slide Rule

I majored in a different field, but am now in the last part of an education in software design. At my present school, I have come to despise slides for anything but short presentations. In particular, the use of slides as the main ingredient in lectures is a disease. It is a general rule, rather than an exception at this place, that lectures consist of flipping through slides being almost verbatim copies of the material in the used text book at a rate of 0.75 slide/min on average during 90 minutes of lecture. Lectures add no value this way, but it seems like lecturers use "producing" slides as an alibi for having prepared a proper lecture.

eldina | 14 years ago | on: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

There is indeed something very wrong with that. You pay your taxes which help fund research and then you are charged exorbitant prices for access to the resulting articles. At the time I quit maths there were a smaller uprising among some mathematicians trying to break away from the large old, but unfortunately also still prestigious, journals. "Algebraic and Geometric Topology", an online journal, was formed when the entire group of editors on Elsevier's "Topology and its Applications" resigned as a reaction to Elsevier's increasingly whack pricing policies. Later the same happened for the top journal "Topology", the resignation letter is stil linked at John Baez's site: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/topology-letter.pdf.

Likewise books, lecture notes etc. written by lecturers should be made freely available. You want to make money on a book you likely created most of while supposedly doing your paid job? GFY.

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