- CS 61AS — Berkeley self-directed Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs course.
- Harbingers of Failure (PDF) — We show that some customers, whom we call ‘Harbingers’ of failure, systematically purchase new products that flop. Their early adoption of a new product is a strong signal that a product will fail – the more they buy, the less likely the product will succeed. Firms can identify these customers either through past purchases of new products that failed, or through past purchases of existing products that few other customers purchase.
- Google Material Design Lite — A library of Material Design components in CSS, JS, and HTML.
- Breakouts — various implementations of the classic game Breakout in numerous different [Javascript] engines.
"games" entries
Four short links: 7 July 2015
SCIP Berkeley Style, Regular Failures, Web Material Design, and Javascript Breakouts
Four short links: 2 July 2015
Mathematical Thinking, Turing on Imitation Game, Retro Gaming in Javascript, and Effective Retros
- How Not to be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking (Amazon) — Ellenberg chases mathematical threads through a vast range of time and space, from the everyday to the cosmic, encountering, among other things, baseball, Reaganomics, daring lottery schemes, Voltaire, the replicability crisis in psychology, Italian Renaissance painting, artificial languages, the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the coming obesity apocalypse, Antonin Scalia’s views on crime and punishment, the psychology of slime molds, what Facebook can and can’t figure out about you, and the existence of God. (via Pam Fox)
- What Turing Himself Said About the Imitation Game (IEEE) — fascinating history. The second myth is that Turing predicted a machine would pass his test around the beginning of this century. What he actually said on the radio in 1952 was that it would be “at least 100 years” before a machine would stand any chance with (as Newman put it) “no questions barred.”
- Impossible Mission in Javascript — an homage to the original, and beautiful to see. I appear to have lost all my skills in playing it in the intervening 32 years.
- Running Effective Retrospectives — Each change to the team’s workflow is treated as a scientific experiment, whereby a hypothesis is formed, data collected, and expectations compared with actual results.
Four short links: 25 June 2015
Enchanted Objects, SE Blogs, AI Plays Mario, and Google's Future of Work
- 16 Everyday Objects Enchanted by Technology (Business Insider) — I want a Skype cabinet between our offices at work.
- Software Engineering Blogs — ALL the blogs!
- MarI/O (YouTube) — clear explanation of how an evolutionary algorithm figures out how to play Mario.
- Google’s Monastic Vision for the Future of Work (New Yorker) — But it turns out that future-proofed life looks a lot like the vacuum-packed present. […] Inside, it is about turning Google into not only a lifestyle but a fully realized life. The return of the Company Town.
Four short links: 2 June 2015
Toyota Code, Sapir-Wharf-Emoji, Crowdsourcing Formal Proof, and Safety-Critical Code
- Toyota’s Spaghetti Code — Toyota had more than 10,000 global variables. And he was critical of Toyota watchdog supervisor — software to detect the death of a task — design. He testified that Toyota’s watchdog supervisor ‘is incapable of ever detecting the death of a major task. That’s its whole job. It doesn’t do it. It’s not designed to do it.’ (via @qrush)
- Google’s Design Icons (Kevin Marks) — Google’s design icons distinguish eight kinds of airline seats but has none for trains or buses.
- Verigames — DARPA-funded game to crowdsource elements of formal proofs. (via Network World)
- 10 Rules for Writing Safety-Critical Code — which I can loosely summarize as “simple = safer, use the built-in checks, don’t play with fire.”
Add depth to your project with practical web audio
Enhance the user experience with the thoughtful use of sound.
There is little debate that Web Audio is cool. Take for example Stepkit by Brent Jackson (embedded below).
It’s definitely a fun toy to play with, but most of us probably couldn’t think of how this might be relevant to our jobs. When I presented 8-bit game music with the Web Audio API at last year’s Fluent Conference, I readily admitted that it was intended to be purely fun rather than practical.
Recently I explored the idea of adding audio to web apps, but I think the big problem isn’t that web developers were unsure how to add audio to their app, but that they don’t think they should add audio to web apps. In this article, I’d like to make the case that you should be considering audio when designing your web application user interface.
Four short links: 28 May 2015
Messaging and Notifications, Game Postmortem, Recovering Robots, and Ethical AI
- Internet Trends 2015 (PDF) — Mary Meeker’s preso. Messaging + Notifications = Key Layers of Every Meaningful Mobile App, Messaging Leaders Aiming to Create Cross-Platform Operating Systems That Are Context-Persistent Communications Hubs for More & More Services. This year’s deck feels more superficial, less surprising than in years past.
- When the Land Goes Under the Sea — As it turns out: People really despise being told to not replay the game. Almost universally, the reaction to that was a kernel of unhappiness amidst mostly positive reviews. In retrospect, including that note was a mistake for a number of reasons. My favorite part of game postmortems is what the designers learned about how people approach experiences.
- Damage Recovery Algorithm for Robots (IEEE) — This illustrates how it’s possible to endow just about any robot with resiliency via this algorithm, as long as it’s got enough degrees of freedom to enable adaptive movement. Because otherwise the Terminators will just stop when we shoot them.
- The Counselor — short fiction with ethics, AI, and how good things become questionable.
Four short links: 27 May 2015
Domo Arigato Mr Google, Distributed Graph Processing, Experiencing Ethics, and Deep Learning Robots
- Roboto — Google’s signature font is open sourced (Apache 2.0), including the toolchain to build it.
- Pregel: A System for Large Scale Graph Processing — a walk through a key 2010 paper from Google, on the distributed graph system that is the inspiration for Apache Giraph and which sits under PageRank.
- How to Turn a Liberal Hipster into a Global Capitalist (The Guardian) — In Zoe Svendsen’s play “World Factory at the Young Vic,” the audience becomes the cast. Sixteen teams sit around factory desks playing out a carefully constructed game that requires you to run a clothing factory in China. How to deal with a troublemaker? How to dupe the buyers from ethical retail brands? What to do about the ever-present problem of clients that do not pay? […] And because the theatre captures data on every choice by every team, for every performance, I know we were not alone. The aggregated flowchart reveals that every audience, on every night, veers toward money and away from ethics. I’m a firm believer that games can give you visceral experience, not merely intellectual knowledge, of an activity. Interesting to see it applied so effectively to business.
- End to End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies (PDF) — paper on using deep learning to teach robots how to manipulate objects, by example.
Creative computing with Clojure
Exploring Clojure as a tool to generate music, visual art, poetry, and dance.
Clojure is gaining traction and popularity as a programming language. Both enterprises and startups are adopting this functional language because of the simplicity, elegance, and power that it brings to their business. The language originated on the JVM, but has since spread to run on the CLR and Node.js, including web browsers and mobile devices. With this spread of practical innovation, there has been another delightful development: a groundswell of people making art with Clojure.
Getting creative with Clojure
Creative Computing combines the power and engineering of the computer with the artistic inspirations of humans. People are using Clojure as a tool to generate music, visual art, poetry, and even dance. This ability to harness technology for creative purposes is both exciting and important. For it not only touches the heart and inspires existing technologists, but it also transcends all barriers. Art is a gateway to bring new people, young and old, from all walks of life, to the field of programming.
Let’s explore some of the areas of Creative Computing with Clojure, and showcase some inspiring examples from a selection of artist/programmers. We’ll look at projects that touch on music, art, games, writing, and even robots.
Teaching kids how to code with Minecraft
Maintaining a focus on fun and interactivity keeps students engaged and enthused while learning Java.
I am jealous of kids these days. The sheer breadth and depth of technology and software at their disposal is staggering, everything from Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and Scratch to Minecraft, Python, and iOS app development. What’s even more profound to me is how fluent they are in using and interacting with these technologies. And yet during this process of assimilation, they are mastering fundamental mathematical concepts, like trigonometry, by figuring out how to shoot an arrow in Minecraft, as opposed to the classical way of learning the formulas. Or in learning how to program in Python, they are creating a game of Tic-Tac-Toe. Or in understanding basic circuits, they are building a traffic light using Arduino or Squishy Circuits.
I consider myself extremely fortunate to be involved with Devoxx4Kids, a Not-for-Profit, 501(c)(3) registered organization in the U.S., whose goal is to deliver Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) workshops to kids at an early age around the world. We delivered over 40 workshops in the U.S. alone last year on topics ranging from Python, Scratch, and Minecraft modding to NAO robots, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and Little Circuits. Globally, we’ve delivered over 350 workshops and connected with approximately 5,000 students, with over 30% girls. Attendees from these workshops often leave with unique and inspirational stories to share. Read more…
Four short links: 23 March 2015
Agricultural Robots, Business Model Design, Simulations, and Interoperable JSON
- Swarmfarm Robotics — His previous weed sprayer weighed 21 tonnes, measured 36 metres across its spray unit, guzzled diesel by the bucketload and needed a paid driver who would only work limited hours. Two robots working together on Bendee effortlessly sprayed weeds in a 70ha mung-bean crop last month. Their infra-red beams picked up any small weeds among the crop rows and sent a message to the nozzle to eject a small chemical spray. Bate hopes to soon use microwave or laser technology to kill the weeds. Best of all, the robots do the work without guidance. They work 24 hours a day. They have in-built navigation and obstacle detection, making them robust and able to decide if an area of a paddock should not be traversed. Special swarming technology means the robots can detect each other and know which part of the paddock has already been assessed and sprayed.
- Route to Market (Matt Webb) — The route to market is not what makes the product good. […] So the way you design the product to best take it to market is not the same process to make it great for its users.
- Explorable Explanations — points to many sweet examples of interactive explorable simulations/explanations.
- I-JSON (Tim Bray) — I-JSON is just a note saying that if you construct a chunk of JSON and avoid the interop failures described in RFC 7159, you can call it an “I-JSON Message.” If any known JSON implementation creates an I-JSON message and sends it to any other known JSON implementation, the chance of software surprises is vanishingly small.