20 Years of Computer Viruses

Slashdot | 20 Years of Computer Viruses:

The Register reports that twenty years ago today (19 January 1986), the first computer virus, Brain, was discovered. By modern standards, this was a minor virus, and it spread by floppy disks, which is a far cry from the network-aware worms of today.

high tech career fair

Red Hat is hosting a JOINT career fair with CISCO, SAS, PROGRESS ENERGY, IBM, and GLAXO on Thursday, 1/26 from 3PM to 7PM.

The email from Red Hat states: "Please instruct all students to bring multiple resumes and to park in the Red Hat parking garage (adjacent to our building)."

For more info and directions to Red Hat, go to their web site.

wash your hands!

I've said it before, but students using the computer labs need to wash their hands ... a lot. From slashdot:

"A test carried out by Pegasus Lab on account for Swedish magazine PC För alla showed that a normal PC keyboard was infected by more bacteria than a normal toilet seat. More specific it contained 33000 bacteria per square centimeter, compared to 130 on a ordinary toilet seat. The tests also showed occurrence of up to 3100 fungi per square centimeter."

The New Classroom Monitors

Remember the "classroom monitor" from Second grade? This was the kid who the teacher asked to tattle on what the rest of the class did while she went to the bathroom.

Inside Higher Ed :: The New Class Monitors reports on a new twist on the "classroom monitor":

In a move that some professors see as a new low in efforts to monitor their classroom activities, a conservative group is offering students at the University of California at Los Angeles money to tape lectures and turn over materials distributed by professors.

The back story is this: some students have criticized certain UCLA professors for being too liberal in the classroom, specifically, by using their classroom time not to study the topics of the course, but rather to further a political agenda. These students formed a web site (uclaprofs.com) which offers to PAY students for submitting reports on what is said in class, and even to submit copies of notes, handouts, etc.

According to the article above, the prices are as follows:

**$100 for “full, detailed lecture notes, all professor-distributed materials and full tape recordings of every class session.”
**$50 for “full detailed lecture notes and all professor-distributed materials.”
**$10 for an “advisory” that a class should be examined and professor-distributed materials collected.

So, in my quick analysis, the debate seems to be over the following:
--are the students within their rights to create the web site?....probably
--are the intellectual property rights of the professors being violated by paying students to transcribe/report something they do not own (the IP of the profs)....unknown

Facebook prank

Boing Boing: Facebook prank on police

AS far as Kyle Stoneman is concerned, the campus police were the ones who started the Facebook wars. "We were just being, well, college students, and they used it against us," says Mr. Stoneman, a senior at George Washington University in Washington.

Mr. Stoneman and his friends decided to fight back. Their weapon of choice? Facebook, of course.

Once again they used the site, which is visited by more than 80 percent of the student body, to chat up a beer blast. But this time, when the campus police showed up, they found 40 students and a table of cake and cookies, all decorated with the word "beer." "We even set up a cake-pong table," a twist on the beer-pong drinking game, he says. "The look on the faces of the cops was priceless." As the coup de grâce, he posted photographs of the party on Facebook, including a portrait of one nonplussed officer.

The article now includes photos of the "cake stand".

Stogatz on Mathematical Insight

The World Question Center has a brief article from applied mathematician and author of one of my favorite books (Sync), Steven Strogatz.

I worry that insight is becoming impossible, at least at the frontiers of mathematics. Even when we're able to figure out what's true or false, we're less and less able to understand why.

In my own field of complex systems theory, Stephen Wolfram has emphasized that there are simple computer programs, known as cellular automata, whose dynamics can be so inscrutable that there's no way to predict how they'll behave; the best you can do is simulate them on the computer, sit back, and watch how they unfold. Observation replaces insight. Mathematics becomes a spectator sport.

If this is happening in mathematics, the supposed pinnacle of human reasoning, it seems likely to afflict us in science too, first in physics and later in biology and the social sciences (where we're not even sure what's true, let alone why).

When the End of Insight comes, the nature of explanation in science will change forever. We'll be stuck in an age of authoritarianism, except it'll no longer be coming from politics or religious dogma, but from science itself.