Author Archives: Sarah Fine

Assignment #5

23 Wednesday Nov 2011

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My five mind habits:

  1. Communication: Everything is instant.  I assume if I haven’t gotten a response back within a certain amount of time (depending on the method of communication) that I will not receive a message back at all.  It’s not that I will not receive a reply in a longer time than these intervals; I am just surprised when I do.  For a text message this is about fifteen minutes, for a missed phone call about an hour and for an email one day.  In the case of a delayed reply, I will obsessively check my inbox/phone for whether I have received a reply, as if my mind cannot move on until I do.
  2. Planning: Everything is last minute.  If I want to see someone that day, I text or call and the plans are made.  The more casual the interaction, the less time beforehand the plans are made, and always electronically.  The maximum time plans are made beforehand is about tow weeks, and this is for a large party (for which invites are sent via Facebook).  However, these electronic invitations have created an interesting mind-habit: doubt about the real number of people attending.  This is more and more true for larger and larger groups.  This is caused by the anonymity of the mass text and Facebook invites, where you can respond with “maybe” or not at all without feeling rude.
  3. Travel: Everything takes forever.  Even with the use of cars and planes, the speed of long-distance travel has not changed in decades, whereas the speed of communication has rocketed forward in recent years.  In the days of endless airport security lines, I have often felt myself yearning for instantaneous travel that is as quick as email.  Now, this may be simply natural human impatience, but I find that these yearnings are tied to technology in my mind.  With so much being instant in our world, long-distance seems impossibly slow.
  4. Meeting new people: the Facebook stalk.  The second you meet a person of interest, you Google them.  In middle school, we used to check last year’s yearbook for interesting tidbits, which is so far less revealing than a Facebook page.  You can learn whether or not a person is single, how old they are, where they work, where they go to/went to school, and if they have any damning quirks, all before having a real human interaction with them.  A recent episode of How I Met Your Mother called “Mystery vs. History” outlined this strange new conundrum in terms of the dating world, where all the mystery can be Googled away once you know the person’s full name.  Google and Facebook have caused an expectation of instant and full knowledge of a person.  I know that when I was first getting to know my boyfriend before we were dating, his lack of a Facebook page was very infuriating.  I ended up Googling his name just to satisfy my appetite for insider facts.  This is the new mind habit—the expectation of little privacy.
  5. Studying: the Wikipedia/Sparknotes effect.  The first thing I do when studying is look up the topic on the internet.  Instead of pouring through textbooks and assigned readings again before a test or big assignment, I look it up.  The best way I’ve found to frame the way I study is to find the topics that other people think are important and focus on those.  This is not a perfect system, however, and has backfired for me on a couple exams.  However, it is always effective at one thing: settling the nerves.  The mind-habit at play here is again the quest for instantaneous information.  I want to know the key topics so I can do well, but I do not want to spend hours re-reading to get to that point.  In a way, I think studying has suffered the most in the new world of technology, as it has instilled an impatience detrimental to the effectiveness of test preparation.  Whereas research has become faster and more expansive (in good and bad ways—but if you know the type of source to look for, the internet is still faster that a library), good study habits have, perhaps, begun to erode.

The future:

In writing this, there is one very clear answer for the area I want technology to leap forward in: travel.  After flying twelve hours to get from Portland to Beijing last year, airplane travel has truly lost its appeal for me.  Airports are crowded, there is a strong possibility that security will grope you, you have to get to the airport at least an hour early, the plane air is always dirty, and the plane seats are impossibly small.  In the end, ever since 9/11, airplane travel has simply lost its charm. Although airplane travel for the masses was truly an amazing innovation, it’s time to again leap forward.  The Star Trek transporter is, of course, the ideal.  Just the though of instantaneous, safe travel to anywhere around the world is so exciting.  But how would the arrival of science fiction transporters affect the world?  Once widespread, it would mean the elimination of automobiles and airplanes, at least for civilians.  The military outcomes would be vast and, in a way, unknowable.  Would warheads be beamed to other countries instead of being flown and dropped?  Would you need a password, or several passwords to beam to certain locations?  Would hacking/cracking these transports be the new computer hack?  No matter what, the introduction of these transporters would completely change the way we see the world, and the way we travel it.

 

Class Summary 11-14-11

14 Monday Nov 2011

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Today we spoke about Software and Property, picking up where we left off last week.  We were shown an ad from 1985 for the HP-85 personal computer because Jon could not get full power on the machine he brought last week.  The sewing machine sized box was advertised as portable, friendly, expandable, and capable of “full-screen editing.”

We then discussed the Time magazine article that was assigned as the reading for today’s class.  Interesting points on the “Machine of the Year” were: the back-up power provided by a hand crank, the fear that computers will completely replace human jobs, the very-un-PC jab at the Japanese out of fear of their success in the computing field, and the lack of prediction of the huge fields of software and tech support.  A notable point was the very low estimate in the 1980s for the maximum number of personal computers in the 2000s: 80 million.  Now, there are ~300 million computers sold each year worldwide.  Although this includes the frequent replacement rate of the personal computer, the modern availability of the computer is far beyond what was predicted.

Next, we discussed “A Brief History of Hackerdom” by Eric Raymond.  An interesting distinction between hacking and cracking, a distinction not made by the media. Where cracking is breaking into a system with malicious intent (the definition used for hacking by the mainstream media), hacking is entering a system without permission but without malicious intent, perhaps to understand and explore a system or to expose fatal flaws to security.  Raymond’s point was that early hackers created the first internet culture by using the ARPANET to communicate about the innovations they were making and/or discovering.  Although the ARPANET did not connect all computers like the modern internet, by logging into compuservers a user could log into discussion boards or download games.  A fun thing to come out of this early internet culture was Blinkenlights.

Next, we read the folloing quote by Donald Knuth (1974):

“Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it require skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty.”

This is not a common view of computer programming, as it seen as more of a math skill that a creative one.  However, a program that works efficiently requires a measure of elegance and ingenuity beyond simply solving a problem.  As a class, we decided that Knuth’s view of computer programming is the ideal, as the real world applied constrictions like limited time and funds.  Although not all computer programming is artistic, all computer programming could be.

We then defined some terms:

—Open source: the code is available to be viewed, with or without a monetary fee

—Free software: two options, free as in beer, or free as in speech.  Free as in beer means it costs no money, while free as in speech means that it is available everywhere, without restriction, with or without a monetary fee

Other ways that software could be “free” or “open” is when software is development in the open, with any hacker allowed the ability to edit and/or add their code to the software.  This very similar to the way Wikipedia is run.  In this way, saying software is “open” or “free” is a complex statement, with several possible meanings.

Class Summary 10-24-11

24 Monday Oct 2011

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We started class reviewing the feedback from last class—it seems that everyone is pretty satisfied, which is great!  From now on, we will be doing about a half and half mix and reading review and class discussion, which is very similar to the previous class format.  A new element will be focused reading questions (non-graded) to aid the reading process, given out via email.

There will be a new blog post with the class’s topics for Assignment #2, as we all kicked butt on the assignment with an average of 9.3/10.

We ended with Hollerith last time, so today we continued right where we left off.  It was mentioned that IBM started on their path to creating the modern computer, at this moment in history, making calculating machines.  The company began as CTR, and became successful selling punch cards to other companies.  This was a very lucrative venture because each punch card can only be used once.  Howard Aiken designed the first real computer in the modern sense, produced by IBM, which cost $1.5 million in modern dollars, which wasn’t even a commercial venture.  The machine was given to Harvard University, and named the Harvard Mark I (although officially it was called Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculators).

This brings us to today’s real topic, Grace Hopper.  She worked as a mathematician for the navy, and when Aiken requested women from WAVES to do calculations (women were often used for calculations during this time, which I found surprising), Hopper started working for IBM.  We read her paper, “The Education of a Computer,” in which she talked about programming computers.  Programming in her time was very low level in comparison to modern programming.  She envisioned using programming languages to speed up and enhance the accuracy of computer calculations, because at the time, only raw numbers were able to be entered into computers.  To demonstrate this process, we played a game called “Robo Rally” in groups of four.

Each team of two was given a robot pieces, and told the following instructions:

000: Forward 1

101: Forward 2

010: Turn right

011: Turn left

100: Back up 1

The goal of the game is to reach the goal marker in 10 moves or less.  The conveyor belt spaces move you one or two spaces post turn, (depending on the number or arrows in the space), the gear spaces rotate you 90 degrees post turn, and the black spaces are death holes that you fall through and die.

The actual game, of course, does not work this way.  Instead of binary codes, players are given cards with symbols on them which represent possible moves.  This is better because sequences of zeros and ones have no semantic meaning to us, and it is very easy to make clerical errors.  Hopper rightly saw that a language to program computers would make programming far more human-friendly.

Grace Hopper did eventually create a programming language, which she called FLOW-MATIC.  At the time, programmers used flow charts to accurately use binary, which inspired the name FLOW-MATIC for her language.  IBM advertised the change thusly, “Mastering the knowledge of the complicated techniques and symbols of conventional computer flow charts requires a long training period.  Flow-Matic charting, however, can be easily grasped by anyone with knowledge of the application to be programmed.”

A fun anecdote about Grace Hopper was the story of the “first bug,” which happened to Harvard Mark II in 1947.  The word bug was used to describe as a flaw in physical design at the time, but after a moth was actually found in the machinery, disrupting a computer program, the term “bug” became a term for a programming flaw or mistake, and “debugging” became the process of fixing this mistake.

Finally, we watched this video:

Grace Hopper 60 Minutes Interview in 1982

For next time, the readings are available on the syllabus.  Questions will be sent out via email, including a request for a saying, less than 80 characters, to be brought in by each student.