Science Games in this holiday season!

Slashdot has an interesting discussion of a science games, based on an article from Wired.  The Wired article has screen shots and age advice.  Slashdot's article just mines the list and doesn't seem to link back(!)

In this holiday season, it is great to have alternatives to yet another lego+movie game tie-in.  Also, perhaps it will give ideas as we begin to move into science festival season.

The original article lists:

• Kerbal Space Program (great reviews, $23, Mac or Windows)
• Minecraft  (many platforms, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, in browser, etc.)
• World of Goo (many platforms, Windows, Mac, Wii, and others)
• Amazing Alex, (iOS, $0.99)
• Patterns (Windows and Mac, currently $10, regularly $20)
• Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts  (XBox 360)
• Fantastic Contraption (in browser but page is covered in ads)
• Orbiter 2010 (Windows, free) 
• Space Chem (iOS $6, Android $?, Windows, Mac, Linus are $10)
• The Codex of Alchemical Engineering (Flash & browser)

With kids that love science, I'm looking forward to the winter break and a chance to give a few more of these a try.  In particular, the Space Chem and the others from ZachtronicsIndustries.com look like a good match for my kids.  We have World of Goo on the Wii, it had their interest for a while but faded.

There is a long list of mathematical and logic games as well that are not about science.  I haven't started compiling a list of them yet.

What am I missing on the science side?  Thoughts on good math games?  (Especially beyond the variations of basic arithmetic practice.)

Google maps comes back to iOS 6

Google now has a maps available again on iOS 6 devices.  It is clear why Apple wanted to make their own maps app and this has been discussed elsewhere but it is unclear why it took Google so long to get their maps app approved.  Was it due to development time or approval delays?  Perhaps Google just wanted to let Apple's map problem fester for a little while before jumping in to help save the day.

In any case, Google's new map app seems to be working well.  I tested it on two locations that have given Apple's maps and some of the other maps apps problems.

The Portland Ballet was not found found in any other map app that I tried.  (Apple Maps, Waze, etc.)

Searching for "Ridgewood Elementary" on Apple Maps directed me to a New York City school with a different name instead of the school a half mile from my location.

I ran the new Google Maps apps on my 3rd generation iPad with iOS 6.0.  It is an iPhone app rather than a universal app but it runs fine and rescales nicely with the 2x button.  See the screen above.  I may download for my iPhone to test but now I feel comfortable enough with the mapping options to get an iPhone 5.

Researching High Tech Recruiters using Honeypots

Elain Wherry posted a very interesting study that she conducted on javascript recruiters.  She is an executive in a small company and was needing to recruit more developers quickly.  She needed to answer questions such as "Is it best to use internal or external recruiters?" and "How important is Linked-In for recruiters?"

She created a fake persona and then watched as recruiters came a calling.  This is a less commonly used research design but showed how she could gain important managerial insights with minimal effort.

Elain doesn't mention that the idea of a "honeypot" is a classic tool in monitoring potential computer security threats - I like the elegance of using this as a research design for examining software developer recruiters using Linked-In and other tools.

My first attempt at an e-book

I have a book on Research Methods that I've been putting together.

It has been available at PSU's Bookstore using the OdinInk Print On-Demand system.  This has worked out well but I've been wanting to try making it into an ebook as well.

After doing reading on Amazon's Kindle publishing program, Barnes and Noble's Nook program, and Apple's iBook, I decided to try the Kindle's program first. the tools seemed to be pretty straightforward but I knew it would be a challenge to take a complex word document and convert it over to ePub or Mobi.   The book has a number of features including:

• Mathematical symbols in the text (font issues!)
• Equations (not handled well when ebooks typically emphasize plain text)
• Tables (hard to handle in ebooks where page layouts are not strictly contained)
• Figures (same as for tables)

I spent about an hour last night and this is what I came up with when viewed in Kindle's preview program.  The first picture is how it would look on the Kindle Fire (an inexpensive color tablet) and the second picture is how it would look with the very common e-ink Kindle ereader.

The pagination seems to change slightly but in both cases the equations are fouled up.  Let's see how it looks in a PDF.

The result is that it will take a lot more work to get this ready for Kindle.

I'll give it some more work but in the meantime, I found a service that allows for selling the PDF and will give that a try.  It is a quirky service that I found from a series of articles on e-publishing that I found on tuaw.com.  Gumroad certainly makes it easy and then you can load it on to any device that can handle a PDF.

Here is a direct link to the book on Gumroad.  https://gumroad.com/l/Timd

It is a first edition so comments and suggestions are welcome.  It is also the version that will be available at the Portland State University OdinInk publishing system.  I think textbooks have really gotten outrageous so I plan on keeping the book very reasonably priced.  The physical OdinInk version is $15 and the  PDF version is $10.  The PDF is DRM free to make it as convenient as possible for readers.  Pages have "gutters" so that it can be printed and put in a 3 ring binder or other binding.  The PDF is in full color while the OdinInk system is black and white except for the cover.  The cover is not included in the PDF but you can use the image at the top of this post or email and I can send it to you.

I'll write another post discussing the book's content.  Suffice it to say that it covers the material that I wish that I had known when I was starting off as a grad student at Georgia Tech many years ago.
I plan on using it as a supplemental book for most of my classes but anyone is welcome to get it.

Have fun!  Feel free to post corrections.  People that identify errata will be acknowledged and thanked in future editions.

Game company hires economist

I thought it was very interesting to hear that Valve was hiring their own economist.

Gaming environments have long included a wide range of economic activities so it might have only been a matter of time until they had their own economist.  This is also interesting to see how Professor Yanis Varoufarkis makes the transition from academia to one of the largest game companies.  It really highlights the opportunities in the modern economy to brand oneself and manage one's own career.  

Kickstarter Launches Now Provides Live Stats on Project Success

Kickstarter was talked about a lot in Spring's Emerging Technologies course.  While Sourceforge helped play a major role in open source software entrepreneurship, Kickstarter is covering a much wider range.  As an organizer of the PICMET conference, I was really impressed with the conference that they are funding using Kickstarter.  What a novel idea that all the all registrations are being done through Kickstarter.

While we talked about interesting  Kickstarter projects in the class, I really missed data that Sourceforge provides on projects, their activities, and success.

Fortunately, Kickstarter has just opened up a stats web page with a lot of this information.  The data is still at the aggregate level but this should prompt a lot of interesting new product development research over the next few years in the same way as Sourceforge has.

While Kickstarter is getting a lot of attention and publicity, I'm also very interested in what Quirky is doing.  If you haven't heard of them, Kickstarter projects are generally pretty mature - prototypes have been tested and now they are getting ready for full production.  In contrast, Quirky helps take ideas from the earliest, raw idea stage.  

Kickstarter, Quirky, and others are broadening the ability for everyone to get involved in New Product Development.  If you have a great idea, you can now do something about it.   Now there is opportunity to mine these sources for data to test ideas and I expect that we will be seeing research papers coming out using this data over the next few years.  

How Khan Academy Is Going Global

Khan Academy is on the leading edge of breaking the traditional models of education.  You've probably heard about it.  TechCrunch had an interesting article on how they are incorporating international transcribing of subtitles.  

http://www.khanacademy.org/images/khan-logo-vertical-transparent.png

This is interesting from several perspectives:

1. Universities are going to be to expected to make subtitles available for required course videos used in online education.  While tools exist for automatic subtitling and Google's YouTube can do this, it will be interesting to see how this affects distance education.
2. The spread of language translations might be an interesting indicator for technology diffusion.  Why is Estonian the language that videos are most frequently translated into?  
3. Helping with this translation process could be a great way for international students to have some unique resume material while working to make a difference in the lives of younger students from developing countries.  

 

Apple has announced that Siri is going to be available on the new iPad but that it will still not be available on  phones that preceded the iPhone 4s.  This seems puzzling since the computational load for Siri is handled by Apple's massive data center(s). 

Similarly, the new Apple maps app for iOS 6 seems like it will be limited to iPhone 4s and later phones.  

Programmers on jailbroken iPhone 4's have long since been able to get Siri running and were able to do so with the mapping app only a few days after release.  Withholding Siri from the iPhone 4 has probably encouraged thousands of users around the world to jailbreak their phones.  

Certainly if third party programmers could do it, Apple could do it too but why won't they?  

The easy answer is that they want to encourage people to upgrade their phones.  Of course this seems plausible but they are "fragmenting" their own OS (albeit to a much slighter extent than Android's tremendous fragmentation problem.)  

Perhaps there is not a possibility - I've got a theory that I have not heard mentioned anywhere else.   There could be a contractual relationship with Google that prevents Apple from cutting out or replacing Google services on iOS devices released before the iPhone 4s.  

Just a theory, what do you think?  

Michael Lewis: Don't Eat Fortune's Cookie

In this season of graduations, I ran across one speech that jumped out at me.

I recommended Michael Lewis' book, Moneyball, years before it came out as a movie.  Fundamentally, it is about a rational decision making transformed an industry stuck with metrics that were essentially unchanged for over 50 years through the lens of baseball.  A smaller, poorer company (team) could compete against the well-funded industry giants (actually Yankees rather than Giants...)

I really enjoyed reading his graduation speech at Princeton where he discussed how he made the transition from Princeton grad to best selling author.  The research and writing skills developed in his thesis were key to creating his later books.  You can read the speech or watch a youtube video.

Skating to Where the Puck Was in 1987

I find John Gruber's blogging format interesting and often agree with his quick takes but recently he attacked new laptops coming out with VGA ports.  His comment that the VGA port is adding bulk and thickness to support a 15 year old out-dated technology.

Skating to Where the Puck Was in 1987
DARING FIREBALL | JUNE 6, 2012
Three brand new PC laptops. The Dell Inspiron R, the Sony Vaio T13112FXS (that name just rolls right off your tongue, no?), and the Toshiba Protege Z9... Read more

He is getting heavily criticized for overlooking the education market and many others.  When I got a new laptop last year, one of my key requirements was for a VGA port.  I understand that a digital connection HDMI, DVI, or DisplayPort is a better technology but there isn't a single room on campus that I have presented in has a digital connection to a projector.  I've presented in dozens of different rooms across campus with projectors and every one of them relies on VGA only.  Sure, I could carry an adapter but as a genuine, absent-minded professor, I will lose them and then then be stuck sometime unable to connect for class.

I bought a laptop last September with a VGA port, I would do it again in a heartbeat no matter how much I want a lighter, thinner laptop.

On a related note, quite a few years ago, I had a laptop that Dell replaced under warranty after trying to fix three times.  They were going to replace it with an equivalent refurbished laptop.  This was pretty good service and I tried to be patient.  After two weeks, I called and heard that they had been searching but couldn't find a single laptop with a 3.5" floppy drive.  It had also been a need for me since students would bring presentations in on floppy but technology quickly eliminated the need for it.  (Between flash drives and wi-fi, there was no need for the floppy drive.)  Every term is a new batch of students so there was no problem with installed legacy technology.

Classroom technology setups are not refreshed as quickly as students.  There are still classrooms with genuine chalkboards!  Sure, in the home and in high tech companies, VGA is dead.  The funding crisis in education will slow he upgrade cycle so VGA will live on for a long time.  Remember, the momentum of installed but obsolete technology can be hard to overcome.  Just look at the QWERTY keyboard layout.

Also, if you are connecting at a variety of places such as research conferences, client sites, etc., you should be prepared to present using VGA.  I'm still amazed at the number of people with new laptops using HDMI or DisplayPort ports but don't come with the VGA connector.

Sure, Mac laptops continue to sell well without VGA ports but that is a big part of why I didn't get one.

Blind Tennis

As someone who  has spent decades playing tennis but always finding a way to have a losing USTA record, this story from the New York Times describes what seems to me to be impossible - blind tennis.  There are adaptations to the game including court size, the ball contains ball bearings to make noise, and multiple bounces allowed but this is still incredibly impressive.

Of course I want to make an obligatory reference to technology and innovation management.  Harvey Mudd College has a project to develop a better ball that will emit sound continuously.

Also, it would be interesting to consider the spread of a "game" such as this from a technology diffusion perspective as well as barriers to technology adoption.  It is hard to think of a technology that faces higher barriers than helping blind people.

Of course the idea of "blind" tennis also makes me think of the very impressive wheelchair tennis players which I have had the good fortune to occasionally see live.

6.5M Linked-In Passwords Compromised - Good time to update passwords

6.5 million Linked-in passwords have apparently been compromised.  I don't know if mine was in the list.  This was a good reminder for me to update my passwords and try to strengthen them.  I just finished doing it for the major sites that I'm worried about.  I'm sure I'll be dealing with a mess of updates for them on a variety of devices over the next few weeks though.

The problem could be much bigger than simply Linked-In though.  Of course most people know the advice about not using the same password across multiple sites but I bet a lot of people do so.  Given the work connections that people have in Linked-In, this suggests the potential of some corporate security problems in addition to all the other ecommerce web sites (Amazon, EBay, etc.) and social sites (Facebook, Google, etc.) and others (dropbox, box.net, etc.). Easy to think of the major damage that can be done by one concerted attack.

As for picking passwords, much has been written and tools for checking password strength.  Personally, I would be careful about typing in passwords into an online tool for checking password strength for a number of reasons:

1. Your computer might already be compromised
2. The internet connection might be insecure and could be "overheard" - particularly if hackers think that a lot of passwords are going to be updated, they might listen in and add tested passwords to their "dictionaries" of passwords to try.  
3. The sites might be spoofed by hackers to use to collect the same information.

Having said that, it is helpful to see how they "score" a password and you can also enter a variation of a password you are actually considering.

Here is a screen capture from PassWordMeter.com where I test the strength of my last name. Obviously it is a very weak and easy to guess password that I've never used.

There are tradeoffs for security vs. remembering since it is a huge security hole to write down passwords.  Make sure not to rely on just words in the dictionary.  A mix of letters and numbers are helpful.  Adding symbols is even better but not all systems accept this.

Tim

Do software engineers need mathematics?

The ETM 540/640 Operations Research course is an applied course on formulating, implementing, and interpreting optimization models.

Occasionally I hear questions about this course and the following article from Hacker News does a nice job discussing this issue.

Do software engineers need mathematics? 
HACKER NEWS | JUNE 2, 2012
http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_10_00.html

Mutual Assessment in the Social Programmer Ecosystem

Leif Singer and colleagues conducted an interesting study on how programmers evaluate each other.  A variety of online communities and status systems have helped strengthen the potential for assessing skill.

This could have significant influence on the future of job hunting and how engineers manage their careers.  It could also affect educational systems as these merit evaluation practices could eat into the value of traditional college degrees.

Mutual Assessment in the Social Programmer Ecosystem
HACKER NEWS | JUNE 2, 2012
http://blog.leif.me/2012/06/mutual-assessment/

The Democratization of Innovation

The last three or four decades seen a major democratization of innovation.  In the 70's there were hardware startups growing toward becoming the big main stream companies like Apple.  The late 90's and the dot com saw the mad rush for the IPO.  The 2000s saw a growth of angel investors and other forms of pre-IPO funding but which still relied on a small number of wealthy people to fund the startups.  (If not the 1%'ers).

The last few years have seen a big push in of the larger population participating in this.  There was Kiva for combining charity and microlending.  This moved on to kickstarter for allowing the masses to help fund projects but without any equity stake.  This could be changing now into kickstarter equivalents that allow for taking an equity stake.

This article in Fast Company does a nice job talking about these new opportunities.

Should be an interesting source of ideas for ETM 590 capstone projects and others classes.

The Crowd Comes Of Age
FAST COMPANY | MAY 31, 2012
http://www.fastcompany.com/1838895/the-crowd-comes-of-age

Tennis racket mountain range chart

Blending a pet peeve of mine on the graphical display of figures with my favorite sport.

Tennis racket mountain range chart
FLOWINGDATA | JUNE 1, 2012
http://flowingdata.com/2012/06/01/tennis-racket-mountain-range/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews


By Dan Piraro of Bizarro Comics.

ETM 548/648, Management of Emerging Technologies will be having their final class project presentations next week on June 6, 2012 starting at 5:30 PM in FAB 40-07. There should be an interesting variety of projects including a technology forecasting project for making new product development targets in the flat panel display industry.

PSU Enables Google's Consumer Apps - First post to Blogger

Portland State University has been using Google Apps for about a year now but this has been limited to gmail, google's calendar, docs, and site.  Today PSU enabled Google's consumer apps for use with university accounts.  I'm going to be trying this as a mechanism for collecting course materials and thoughts throughout the year.

If you have thoughts or advice on the matter, please let me know.  I am debating using labels for each of the course numbers and their names for the courses that I teach.  If anyone has suggestions, please feel free to let me know.