Strange Aeons

I think that the "Land War in Asia (aka, CS undergraduate education)" post over at FCS' Difference Engine Blog skirts around some of the ideas I have been playing with recently about teaching Computer Science and Applied Computing. In particular is the following phrase:

    We need to teach Computing that has purpose and meaning

which I think is what Applied Computing tries, but often fails, to do. The idea that is sugested in the linked post is for CS teaching to tell a story (perhaps metaphorically) and to have a beginning, middle, and end. In the real world many people do not need skills from the more theoretical end of CS. I say this with my tongue ever so slightly in my cheek, having thought that I wouldn't need any of those geometry and trigonometry skills from Mathematics until I started working on visualisations of argument structure. Although I say that for effect as I actually needed those skills when I worked building sites doing joinery in the real world. In computing though, the skills that people do need are applied computing skills. These are good, practical, real-world computing skills that cover at least formal skills in:

•     problem solving,
•     ideation,
•     coding,
•     source control,
•     development methodology,
•     team-working,
•     communication
•     probably others but I can't think of any right now...

Additonally there needs to be sufficient background and experience of the academic side of CS to allow the student to have some idea of the breadth of tools and techniques that CS can offer as well as how to aquire and apply them to their own problems. However I don't think that Applied Computing should be taught in isolation as I do not want to turn Applied Computing into a vocational course. I think that what is required is the story, provided by an associated application domain that scaffolds the use of computational tools to solve problems. For example, Applied Computing with Life Sciences, Psychology, Law, Engineering, or any of a myriad of subject domains. At university level these should of course be selected from those areas that the University is already good at. For example, the University of Dundee has a large and successful College of Life Sciences and increasing numbers of vacancies for software developers which it struggles to fill. Unfortunately there is not sufficient joined-up-thinking to ensure that LifeSci students are getting a thorough grounding in computing so the graduates that are being produced are not suited to some of the jobs that are becoming available. With the increasing trend towards heavy computer use in the life sciences this is a bad situation. Additionally, the Applied Computing degree does not have close ties with many of the range of other subject domains that Dundee does well, so ends up being a kind of theory-light CS. This gives graduates lots of tools to take away with them but no subject matter of their own to which they can apply them.

Interestingly this approach might be useful in tackling that age-old question of how to attract and retain women undergraduates in CS. In "Is Teaching Computer Science Different from Teaching Other Sciences?" (1997), Bernstein suggests that women see computers as tools and men see computers as toys. Whilst I think that this is an overly simplistic view, gender bias and preferences are much more complicated than that, I think that teaching computers as tools is essentially what I have suggested above but with the caveat that an application domain gives you the structure and narrative into which to fit those computing tools.

If you are interested in the network analysis of social media data but don't know where to start then this description of a BetaLabs skill sharing workshop should be enough to get you bootstrapped. Assuming you know some Python, the remaining tools are as follows:

• Tweepy - Twitter API Python Library
• NetworkX - Network/Graph Python Library
• Gephi - Network Vizualisation Application

Essentially the class did the following:

1. Used Tweepy to access Twitter API & grab lists of users related to BetaWorks and for each user access their relationships
2. Used NetworkX to build a graph of relationships using the data retrieved from Twitter
3. Export the graph in GraphML format
4. Import the graph into Gephi for manipulation, personalisation, investigation, &c.

Example code is available from GitHub

Over at Comics Alliance there is a nice "Ask Chris" post that sets out to answer the Question, "On Scooby-Doo, do you prefer the monsters to be real or people in costumes?". What is nice about the answer "people in costumes" is that Chris goes further and claims that "there should never, ever be even a trace of the supernatural in the world of Scooby-Doo".

This is because Scooby-Doo is not about the supernatural, its not really a cartoon about kids fighting monsters but about kids looking for truth.

"the world is full of grown-ups who lie to kids, and that it's up to those kids to figure out what those lies are and call them on it, even if there are other adults who believe those lies with every fiber of their being. And the way that you win isn't through supernatural powers, or even through fighting. The way that you win is by doing the most dangerous thing that any person being lied to by someone in power can do: You think."

Seen through the lense of late sixties idealism, Scooby-Doo becomes a cartoon in which the viewer is trained to understand that whatever the mystery, you just have to observe, ask questions, and think to come up with rational explanations. The monsters don't really exist, just bad people who want to make you too scared to look, let alone ask questions or think, so that they can take advantage. Against this backdrop Scooby-Doo becomes a really nice way to educate children in the prerequisite skills of critical thinking: (1) observing, (2) questioning, and (3) thinking.

 

Addendum: There is also a nice discussion thread about this over at BoingBoing

I have been doing a fair bit of web oriented coding recently, finally getting to grips with Javascript and newer web technologies. The upshot is that I nearly have a new tool for visualising argumentation structures ready to push to my github account. In getting ready to do this I started finding out about things like minification and packaging for Javascript files to make the downloads as efficient as possible. The general consensus seems to be that you minify and package everything up into a single Javascript file which gives you the best trade-off of minimising the number of HTTP connections and minimising the amount actually transferred but without the computational overhead of unpacking.

One thing I was unsure about was how to handle versioning at deploy time, especially as I move towards continuous deployment of various projects. Turns out that one way of doing this is to name the Javascript file with the hash of the file instead of just calling it all.js or adding a query string. This gives a unique name for your src file without subjecting you to the vagaries of any cloud deployment infrastructure that may be operating on eventually consistent principles. This is nicely explained, with diagrams in this post over at Ben Kamen's blog. In the comment thread from that post, one commenter suggests also that using an Amazon S3 bucket to hold Javascript files and ensuring to deploy  the new Javascript file there before any code that accesses it is made available to users is a good approach also.

So Jeremy Clarkson said something else that was stupid and designed to inflame public opinion. As Ben Goldacre points out "Complaining about Clarkson expressing an offensive view is like complaining that the wheels just fell off your clown taxi". The problem I have with what he said was that he sought to isolate an identifiable group of people and advocate bad things happening to them. Do I want that kind of speech restricted? No. Definitely not. I support freedom of speech especially for those people who say things with which I disagree because freedom of speech does not exist without the freedom to utter unpopular speech. That said, if you say something that causes offense then there may be repercussions, I just don't believe that these should be legal repercussions but that repercussions, if any, should come from public opinion, perception, and reaction.

But that is an aside to what this post is really about. The thought that was stirred up by this was more about a particular type of argument associated with this kind of outburst. Specifically the way that we react to this kind of statement. For example, Clarkson, referring to are public-sector workers who were on strike on November 30th, said the following:

 

   "I’d have them all shot. I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families."

One of the reasons that he should not have said this is that if you replace the group "public-sector workers" with Black people, women, children, homosexuals, transgender, Jewish, or any other minority group then you get a much more serious statement. A statement that in some cases could conceivably see you landed in jail. For example:

    "I’d have Homosexuals shot. I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families."

In these cases the defense of "only joking" rings hollow on most occasions. I suspect that, given that Clarkson is also a public-sector worker he doesn't literally advocate what he said but rather uttered something that stemmed partly from an "I'm alright Jack" perception of events and partly something that  was calculated to cause some amount of offense as his job in relation to anything that isn't related to cars seems to be taking potshots at easy targets like some kind of BBC sponsored bully. If Clarkson had used the exact same words in reference to black people then he could have been charged under one of those heinous little incitement laws that target the effects of discrimination rather than the underlying causes so that the government can be seen to be doing something without really doing anything of consequence.

For the moment I will refer to this stereotypical pattern of reasoning as the argument for the substitution of subjects which essentially has the following structure:

CONCLUSION: Alpha's argument about subject X should not be accepted .

SUBSTITUTION PREMISE: The argument would not hold if you substitute subject Y for subject X.

EQUIVALENCE PREMISE: What holds for subject Y also holds for subject X

MINOR PREMISE: Subjects X &/or Y are groups of individuals that have a special status.

What is interesting here is that an evaluation of the original argument or statement can be made based upon changing the variables. An argument with respect to group Y would not be acceptable so the argument with respect to group X is not acceptable either. This is interesting because it has a flavour of strawman about it. The defense against the position deliberately misrepresents the stated position of the speaker by ascribing a position to them that they haven't stated that they hold. Usually this is considered to be a rhetorical practice; misrepresent your opponents position to create something that is easier to attack than their actual stated position. In this case though it is a quite devastating rhetorical technique, particularly because when used in a public it creates an indefensible position. It is a difficult defense to maintain to say "of course I wouldn't support doing X to Y but Z are different" because it has the feeling of creating a minority that it is alright to do terrible things to because somehow they are different or 'other'.

We see this kind of argument quite often when dealing with tough real-world problems. This usually occurs in relation to problems that are affected by some form of prejudicial feeling. For example, some quite dispicable things are said in discussions on so-called 'gay marriage' or 'gay adoption' (NB. these terms are quoted because in my opinion there is JUST marriage and JUST adoption regardless of the sexuality of those concerned).

For example, I have heard people say that homosexual people should not be allowed to raise adopted children. If you substitute an alternative minority group for gay then the argument immediately becomes ludicrous. However the same people will rarely say that they do not believe that black or Jewish or disabled people should not be allowed to raise children.  Generally these utterances and the associated substitution expose the prejudices of the speaker more than they provide an edifying and well reasoned argument for or against a given stance. They are in fact one of the ways to distinguish whether the entire dialogue is worth having in the first place. Gilbert suggests in "How To Win An Argument" that you should never argue with a fanatic, perhaps this should be extended to bigots as well.