Stanford published 10 online Computer Science courses under a Creative Commons license. Each course is made of videos, lecture notres, assignment and homeworks. The University reports that the content is nearly identical to what is offered to on-campus students.

• Programming Methodology — CS106A
• Programming Abstractions — CS106B
• Programming Paradigms — CS107
• Introduction to Robotics — CS223A
• Natural Language Processing — CS224N
• Machine Learning — CS229
• The Fourier Transform and its Applications — EE261
• Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems — EE263
• Convex Optimization I — EE364A
• Convex Optimization II — EE364B

My only beef is that online videos are awfully boring, irrespective of the lecturer. If only I could convince more people to stop lecturing! Otherwise, the content is well organized and generally beautiful.

It is easy to dismiss these things as marketing gimmicks. But doing so would be like dismissing company Web sites in 1996 as gimmicks. These are the latest seeds of a long stream of seeds that will change higher education forever.

Disclaimer: I teach 3 online-only Computer Science university-level courses, including a graduate course.

Colin Wightman was recently fired from Acadia University. What wrong did he do? Mostly he had a one-time consensual bondage experience with a lady. They also accused him of using the university computers for some cybersex purposes.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers found the dismissal grossly abusive. They call for a censure of Acadia University unless Wightman is rehired.

Disclaimer: I was once a professor at Acadia University.

Universities worldwide are starting to offer online courses. Personnally, I just launched my first Computer Science graduate course (INF 6104, in French).

Because students can take the course on their own time at home, without having to show up at designated time, accessibility is unbeatable. (Disclaimer: some online courses still require you to show at designated times.) However, the transformation goes deeper than just having increased accessibility… the consequences are far reaching!

Some students need a professor holding their hand (see FSP’s recent account). These students are apparently reluctant to use Google, to seek the answers for themselves. In fact, they are probably perfectly able to browse, search, and read on their own. What they need is a strong emotional bound to peers and a teacher. These are the same students who will prefer to wait 30 minutes in line for a human teller instead of using an automated teller. These are the same people who will go to a crowded bookstore to buy a book, even if they have to drive 50 minutes to get there, instead of buying their book online in 3 minutes. What they seek is the human touch. Alas, in learning, shopping, traveling, the human touch will soon be an option. For computers to alleviate our work, we need to learn to rely more often on computers, and less often on human beings.

If you paid attention, you might see that I am drawing you somewhere… online teaching… automated tellers…

To a large extend, what I do with my students is to automate more and more of the teaching process. I no longer assign problems and then ask students to come to my office if they cannot do it. I post the solution online! I no longer wait for the unavoidable questions (when is homework 1 due?), I post all of the answers online. How do I know that I have posted all of the answers? Because 99% of all questions I get from students are answered on the Web site! I even get to tell my students about related stories in an automated manner (by using a blog). I work very hard so that I never need to repeat myself. I write it once for all students, for all times.

And I am not alone. My colleague Guy Tremblay designed a system called Oto. While I do not think he would spin it quite this way, the goal of Oto is to automate the marking of programming assignments to some extend.

A very popular service to learn English as a foreign language is Gymglish, an online automated teaching tool. Reviews are very good.

I conclude with some expected consequences:

• Automated teaching will make learning far more accessible and, eventually, slightly more affordable. The great benefit will be to be able to get a degree in nanomolecular physics from the North Pole.
• Students who do not need the “human touch” in any case, will get more learning done in a shorter time with automated teaching. Other students will complain that professors are no longer “there for them”. Automation will transform teaching, not make it better or worse.
• Just as computers are transforming the jobs of travel agents, bank tellers, and bookstore managers, they will have deep and profound consequences for teachers and professors. It is just a matter of time! Consider all the routine operations you do and see how you can outsource them to a computer! How much time do you spend in class telling students about when the next midterm is, and what is covered? Telling them how to get the last set of lecture notes?
• There will always be students who need the emotional bound with a professor and with their peers. Automation can only go so far. That is, until we can achieve true AI and people start becoming friend with their computers!

I have written a lot of C++ code in the last year or so. The C family of languages have types that will vary in size depending on the OS and the CPU.

I thought my Macs had 32-bit CPUs because the “long” type uses 32 bits. Why would Intel sell 32-bit CPUs to Apple? I did not care for the answer.

However, my current work is very sensitive to the CPU word length. So I decided to look into the matter. Turns out that Apple is buying standard 64-bit processors from Intel. But somehow, the C compiler defaults to 32-bit binaries.

Thankfully, the fix is easy. Go from…

g++ -O2 -o test test.cpp

to…

g++ -O2 -m64 -o test test.cpp

For some code I wrote, this meant running twice as fast!

Disclaimers: 1) I have not checked whether the same thing is still true with MacOS 10.5. 2) You might encounter some difficulties if you try to link a 64-bit executable with 32-bit libraries. 3) I am not claiming that your software will run twice as fast with 64-bit words.

There is, I believe, a tension between management and innovation. Innovation is fundamentally disruptive. There is plenty of evidence that too much order is a bad idea:

• If your heart becomes too regular, you may be about to die.
• American backyards made of only good-looking grass are high-energy, unstable systems.

However, complete chaos is not productive. What is needed is some form of partially controlled chaos. The solution? Embrace some chaos, seek diversity! But keep your basic sane routine intact.

If you are a researcher, I have a challenge for you: once a year, work on a project and publish a paper that is crazy. It can be a project outside of your normal field of expertise. In any case, it should raise some eye brows. If you have tenure or a similarly stable job, why would you not? You will not get fired for writing one crazy paper a year. But it may greatly enhance the biodiversity of your ideas.

If you are a software designer, design one totally crazy software application every year. Write a piece of software that has nothing to do with your own work, or that goes against all principles you normally apply. Finding time for a wild project is not so difficult. The project itself may not be productive, but it may keep you on your toes.

The idea is not to throw away the much-needed regularity that keeps us productive. But please, inject chaos in your life.

Note: Having kids counts as controlled chaos.

We just enrolled our oldest son in some karate lessons. I am not sure how useful this will be, but given that I got regularly in trouble with bad guys in school, I am hoping it will help him a bit.

Would you gang up on this kid?

Imagine if you came to my blog and it would load all unread articles. New readers would get a list of 1000+ posts. You would then need to hide each post, one by one.

It would be annoying, wouldn’t it?

Likewise, I am seriously getting annoyed at email and RSS clients. I need a very simple function: if I have not read an email or a RSS post in x days, please take it off from my inbox. Move it into an auto-archive box.

I find it stressful to see all these emails waiting for me! Yes, I know about Inbox Zero, but I get so many emails that just archiving them manually takes too long!