We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

What is Computer Science ...

I so wish, the lecturers all over India who start teaching Computer Science to numerous engineering students, read this article. Atleast they will understand something in Computer Science and how it is supposed to be taught.

Courtesy - Great Ideas in Computer Science Spring 2008, from OCW MIT.

What is computer science?

Computer science is not glorified programming. Edsger Dijkstra, Turing Award winner and extremely opinionated man, famously said that computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes. We claim that computer science is a mathematical set of tools, or body of ideas, for understanding just about any system—brain, universe, living organism, or, yes, computer. Scott got into computer science as a kid because he wanted to understand video games. It was clear to him that if you could really understand video games then you could understand the entire universe. After all, what is the universe if not a video game with really, really realistic special effects?

OK, but isn’t physics the accepted academic path to understanding the universe? Well, physicists have what you might call a top-down approach: you look for regularities and try to encapsulate them as general laws, and explain those laws as deeper laws. The Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to start digging a little deeper in less than a year.

Computer science you can think of as working in the opposite direction. (Maybe we’ll eventually meet the physicists half-way.) We start with the simplest possible systems, and sets of rules that we haven’t necessarily confirmed by experiment, but which we just suppose are true, and then ask what sort of complex systems we can and cannot build.

The Meaning of Maths

The meaning of math
By DWIGHT R. WORLEY
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original Publication: April 25, 2006)

You can bombard 14-year-old Corey Brown with logic. You can employ
statistical probabilities and add up all the reasons you need X (math) to
understand Y (money).

But you'll have an easier time factoring pi to 1,000 decimal places than
convincing this eighth-grader that algebra is important — or useful.
"I don't think this is really going to matter to me. When am I going to
ever use it?" Brown, who attends Rye Middle School and wants to be an
architect, asked after a recent math class. "Some of the stuff we do,
doesn't have anything to do with buildings and design."
Brown is one of millions of students — and adults — who aren't
convinced that most math is all that important in their everyday lives.
Using the math technique of deductive reasoning, that probably also
means that many people aren't concerned that April is Math Awareness
Month, a time set aside to increase understanding and appreciation for
the subject.

Started as Math Awareness Week in 1986 by President Reagan, the concept didn't exactly catch fire with the public but was expanded anyway as the U.S. aimed to encourage more students to study mathematics. But despite two decades of trying to revive math's public image, few subjects continue to evoke as much terror as algebra,
trigonometry, statistics and, perhaps the most feared of all, calculus. Researchers estimate that between 50 percent and 80 percent of U.S. adults, and probably a similar share of children, suffer from some form of math anxiety. That fear translates into subpar performance of children, experts say. Researchers ranked American students 24th out of 29 industrialized countries in math literacy.

"Math anxiety is very common," said Peter Arvanites, a math professor at Rockland Community College who has held workshops on overcoming a fear of math. "If you think about it, math is one of the few subjects where you can publicly declare that you're not good at and not be embarrassed. Our culture is perpetuating this fear and phobia of math. It's saying that it's all right to have and not do anything about it." So if adults are so scared of math, and appear to get along fine without knowing too much about it, why do kids have to learn it? You need it to count change at a store and balance a checkbook, but John Aguilar, a math teacher at Rye Middle School, tries to convince his students that math is not as much about numbers as about ideas. He
said the way math is taught, usually through memorization of formulas and sets of complex rules that can intimidate some students, doesn't show how you can use it to find patterns in life or work your way stepby- step through complex problems.

Aguilar points to television shows like "Deal or No Deal" on NBC, a game show governed by the laws of probability, and the CBS drama "Numbers," in which a genius uses math to help the FBI solve crimes, as examples of how learning math can be fun and applied beyond the blackboard.

"The most frequent question we hear is 'When are we going to use this in real life?' " Aguilar said. "But even if students don't use the math or arithmetic, they'll definitely use the logical reasoning and deductive reasoning thinking skills that they learn in a math class." In short, the mathematical process of analyzing problems and double-checking your work teaches you to think — about almost everything.

But try telling that to a room full of eighth-graders praying for the bell to ring as a teacher draws lines and curves on the board and explains equations for finding slopes and y-intercepts, said Gisele Glosser of Cortlandt, a former math teacher who runs a company that sells mathematics software. "Students always say they hate math," she said. "But by connecting the math to the real world, they were much more motivated to learn what I had to show them."

Still, even in schools like Rye Middle and South Orangetown Middle, which had high percentages of students scoring at Level 4 on state math tests last year — considered mastery of the subject — students aren't always sure why all this "numbers stuff" is important. For them, there's arithmetic, which they acknowledge they need, and then there's ... algebra.

"You know you have to do it, but sometimes you wonder what it's all for," Keira McCoy, a senior at South Orangetown Middle School, said recently after her algebra class.

"We're never going to need algebra," said Christian Dedalmas, as he settled into his seat in math class at Rye Middle. He was joined by several of his classmates who added their thoughts about the uselessness of algebra. Well, another way to look at algebra, is using what you know to discover what you don't. And children do that
every time they try to figure out how to buy as much stuff as possible with their allowance, said Arvanites of RCC. "When you think of how many items you can buy without exceeding a certain amount, including sales tax, that's not purely arithmetic. It involves sequential reasoning, variables and different cases," he said. "Many students don't realize that that's algebra."

As for Brown, the budding architect, if he wants to design buildings that don't fall down, he'll need those lines and slopes in algebra, Aguilar said. That's because algebra helps determine what size house can fit on a given lot, while physics will help him determine how much weight different materials can hold. And he'll need trigonometry to properly design a roof to fit the structure, he said.

"It's all right," Brown said with a smile after listening to an explanation of how architects use advanced math. "I'll get motivated in college."

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

What is Computer Science ...

I so wish, the lecturers all over India who start teaching Computer Science to numerous engineering students, read this article. Atleast they will understand something in Computer Science and how it is supposed to be taught.

Courtesy - Great Ideas in Computer Science Spring 2008, from OCW MIT.

What is computer science?

Computer science is not glorified programming. Edsger Dijkstra, Turing Award winner and extremely opinionated man, famously said that computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes. We claim that computer science is a mathematical set of tools, or body of ideas, for understanding just about any system—brain, universe, living organism, or, yes, computer. Scott got into computer science as a kid because he wanted to understand video games. It was clear to him that if you could really understand video games then you could understand the entire universe. After all, what is the universe if not a video game with really, really realistic special effects?

OK, but isn’t physics the accepted academic path to understanding the universe? Well, physicists have what you might call a top-down approach: you look for regularities and try to encapsulate them as general laws, and explain those laws as deeper laws. The Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to start digging a little deeper in less than a year.

Computer science you can think of as working in the opposite direction. (Maybe we’ll eventually meet the physicists half-way.) We start with the simplest possible systems, and sets of rules that we haven’t necessarily confirmed by experiment, but which we just suppose are true, and then ask what sort of complex systems we can and cannot build.

Why we need Maths ...

The meaning of math
By DWIGHT R. WORLEY
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original Publication: April 25, 2006)

You can bombard 14-year-old Corey Brown with logic. You can employ
statistical probabilities and add up all the reasons you need X (math) to
understand Y (money).

But you'll have an easier time factoring pi to 1,000 decimal places than
convincing this eighth-grader that algebra is important — or useful.
"I don't think this is really going to matter to me. When am I going to
ever use it?" Brown, who attends Rye Middle School and wants to be an
architect, asked after a recent math class. "Some of the stuff we do,
doesn't have anything to do with buildings and design."
Brown is one of millions of students — and adults — who aren't
convinced that most math is all that important in their everyday lives.
Using the math technique of deductive reasoning, that probably also
means that many people aren't concerned that April is Math Awareness
Month, a time set aside to increase understanding and appreciation for
the subject.

Started as Math Awareness Week in 1986 by President Reagan, the concept didn't exactly catch fire with the public but was expanded anyway as the U.S. aimed to encourage more students to study mathematics. But despite two decades of trying to revive math's public image, few subjects continue to evoke as much terror as algebra,
trigonometry, statistics and, perhaps the most feared of all, calculus. Researchers estimate that between 50 percent and 80 percent of U.S. adults, and probably a similar share of children, suffer from some form of math anxiety. That fear translates into subpar performance of children, experts say. Researchers ranked American students 24th out of 29 industrialized countries in math literacy.

"Math anxiety is very common," said Peter Arvanites, a math professor at Rockland Community College who has held workshops on overcoming a fear of math. "If you think about it, math is one of the few subjects where you can publicly declare that you're not good at and not be embarrassed. Our culture is perpetuating this fear and phobia of math. It's saying that it's all right to have and not do anything about it." So if adults are so scared of math, and appear to get along fine without knowing too much about it, why do kids have to learn it? You need it to count change at a store and balance a checkbook, but John Aguilar, a math teacher at Rye Middle School, tries to convince his students that math is not as much about numbers as about ideas. He
said the way math is taught, usually through memorization of formulas and sets of complex rules that can intimidate some students, doesn't show how you can use it to find patterns in life or work your way stepby- step through complex problems.

Aguilar points to television shows like "Deal or No Deal" on NBC, a game show governed by the laws of probability, and the CBS drama "Numbers," in which a genius uses math to help the FBI solve crimes, as examples of how learning math can be fun and applied beyond the blackboard.

"The most frequent question we hear is 'When are we going to use this in real life?' " Aguilar said. "But even if students don't use the math or arithmetic, they'll definitely use the logical reasoning and deductive reasoning thinking skills that they learn in a math class." In short, the mathematical process of analyzing problems and double-checking your work teaches you to think — about almost everything.

But try telling that to a room full of eighth-graders praying for the bell to ring as a teacher draws lines and curves on the board and explains equations for finding slopes and y-intercepts, said Gisele Glosser of Cortlandt, a former math teacher who runs a company that sells mathematics software. "Students always say they hate math," she said. "But by connecting the math to the real world, they were much more motivated to learn what I had to show them."

Still, even in schools like Rye Middle and South Orangetown Middle, which had high percentages of students scoring at Level 4 on state math tests last year — considered mastery of the subject — students aren't always sure why all this "numbers stuff" is important. For them, there's arithmetic, which they acknowledge they need, and then there's ... algebra.

"You know you have to do it, but sometimes you wonder what it's all for," Keira McCoy, a senior at South Orangetown Middle School, said recently after her algebra class.

"We're never going to need algebra," said Christian Dedalmas, as he settled into his seat in math class at Rye Middle. He was joined by several of his classmates who added their thoughts about the uselessness of algebra. Well, another way to look at algebra, is using what you know to discover what you don't. And children do that
every time they try to figure out how to buy as much stuff as possible with their allowance, said Arvanites of RCC. "When you think of how many items you can buy without exceeding a certain amount, including sales tax, that's not purely arithmetic. It involves sequential reasoning, variables and different cases," he said. "Many students don't realize that that's algebra."

As for Brown, the budding architect, if he wants to design buildings that don't fall down, he'll need those lines and slopes in algebra, Aguilar said. That's because algebra helps determine what size house can fit on a given lot, while physics will help him determine how much weight different materials can hold. And he'll need trigonometry to properly design a roof to fit the structure, he said.

"It's all right," Brown said with a smile after listening to an explanation of how architects use advanced math. "I'll get motivated in college."

Monday, June 21, 2010

M. J. Adler - a great academician

Some very well known scientists / academics leave a strong mark of their work when they leave this world. Mr. M.J. Adler is one such person. A PhD in philosophy. He has written some amazing books to date.

Here is a collection of some of his best work so far on various topics.
http://www.thegreatideas.org/adler-on.html


And here is a very much useful article from him, on "How to read a scientific book". Reading a novel is different than reading a scientific book. He explains lot of myths here in a very much illustrative manner.

http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf


Everybody can learn

I am a strong believer of sharing philosophy, that it almost gets suffocating when I come across instances where under the name of competition things are hidden. Friends hides job placements, employees hide access to information and knowledge transfer, parents hide intricacies of teaching their children how to live a meaningful life, government hides information that would aid its citizens take correct decisions.

Most of this hiding comes from a strong sense of competition that is imbibed in us right from childhood, because if your own child wont succeed some body else's will and that will be bad. Failures are considered miserable and sometimes reprimanded with strong punishments. The hiding games begins from this stage and then it continues. I will call it the act as self preservance.

Here is a great cause by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to share the knowledge for a better world. They have some of the best taught courses available here, from the best professors in the world.

http://ocw.mit.edu/


But some how I strongly feel that inorder to learn anything scientific, you need to understand how to learn it. As I said before, there are different methods of learning, and just because it is from MIT, things will not get straightforwards and start twinkling in your head. This is the kind of learning that gets experienced in American schools, IITs and IISCs.

Kudos MIT for the great step. I wish many more universities open their doors like this. But the most important stuff is to let have lectures which will tell the prospective learners how to learn this material and what is the procedure.


-Mrunal