Erik Schmidt on computing education in the UK

In August, Edinburgh is Festival City, hosting the International Festival, the Fringe, the book festival, and many others. At the media festival, my old coauthor, Erik Schmidt (now chair of Google), delivered a keynote which included wise words on computing and education:

First: you need to bring art and science back together. Think back to the glory days of the Victorian era. It was a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges. Lewis Carroll didn’t just write one of the classic fairytales of all time, he was also a mathematics tutor at Oxford. James Clerk Maxwell was described by Einstein as among the best physicists since Newton - but was also a published poet.

Over the past century the UK has stopped nurturing its polymaths. There’s been a drift to the humanities - engineering and science aren’t championed. Even worse, both sides seem to denigrate the other - to use what I’m told is the local vernacular, you’re either a ‘luvvy’ or a ‘boffin’.

To change that you need to start at the beginning with education. We need to reignite children’s passion for science, engineering and maths. In the 1980’s the BBC not only broadcast programming for kids about coding, but (in partnership with Acorn) shipped over a million BBC Micro computers into schools and homes. That was a fabulous initiative, but it’s long gone. I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn’t even taught as standard in UK schools. Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it’s made. That is just throwing away your great computing heritage.

At college-level too, the UK needs to provide more encouragement and opportunity for people to study science and engineering. In June, President Obama announced a programme to train 10,000 more engineers a year. I hope others will follow suit - the world needs more engineers. I saw the other day that on The Apprentice Alan Sugar said engineers are no good at business. Really? I don’t think we’ve done too badly!

If the UK’s creative businesses want to thrive in the digital future, you need people who understand all facets of it integrated from the very beginning. Take a lead from the Victorians and ignore Lord Sugar: bring engineers into your company at all levels, including the top.

A better tube

Two alternatives to the traditional London Tube map, one closer to geographically acurate and one with distortion grid in the background.  Spotted on Boing Boing.

The City and The City

Looking forward to China Mieville's appearance at the Edinburgh Festival, my wife discovered that Edinburgh libraries have two listings for The City and The City: one with the title as expected, filed under Science Fiction, and one with the second half of the title backward (trying to emulate the mirror writing on the cover), filed under Crime.

Workers facing a bleak old age says pension review

Yesterday's news contained “a wake-up call” on the poor state of private pensions. My union is in dispute over changes to our pension plan (which affect new hires more severely than old folk like me). The government argues that public sector pensions need to change because they are out of line with provision in the private sector. But, as this report shows, the problem is not that public sector pensions are “gold plated” but that private sector pensions are woefully inadequate.

4-Profit University

The coalition has announced plans to encourage private firms to set up `for profit' degree courses.  The idea comes from the US, and to see the high esteem in which such institutions are held there, have a look at the above strip from Tom The Dancing Bug.  The Guardian warns the threat to universities is real and imminent. Early day motion 1999 raises concern about for-profit universities; They Work For You make it easy to write to your MP to urge him or her to support it.

The Economist notices

The concurrency crisis is upon us: Moore's Law will continue only if we learn to write parallel programs. This is important enough you might expect it to show up in the mainstream press, and at last it is. From the 2 June 2011 issue of the Economist:

Meanwhile, a group of obscure programming languages used in academia seems to be making slow but steady progress, crunching large amounts of data in industrial applications and behind the scenes at large websites. Two examples are Erlang and Haskell, both of which are “functional programming” languages.

Such languages are based on a highly mathematical programming style (based on the evaluation of functions) that is very different from traditional, “imperative” languages (based on a series of commands). This puts many programmers off. But functional languages turn out to be very well suited to parallel programming. Erlang was originally developed by Ericsson for use in telecoms equipment, and the language has since been adopted elsewhere: it powers Facebook’s chat feature, for example. Another novel language is Scala, which aims to combine the best of both functional and traditional languages. It is used to run the Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare websites, among others.

A combinator library for the design of railway track layouts

How cool is this? Barney Stratford, Journal of Functional Programming, 21(3), May 2011.

In the design of railway track layouts, there are only a small number of geometric configurations that are used in practice, and a number of constraints as to how those configurations can be fitted together to create a whole layout. In order to solve these problems, we construct a Haskell combinator library. The library has been used for the design of real-world track layouts.

RSAnimate

The RSA has a series of videos cleverly animated from lectures. I would love to illustrate a lecture this way! Spotted by Maurice Naftalin.

Case analysis

A Latin saying, heard on Escape Pod:

It is well to remember that there are five reasons for drinking: The arrival of a friend; one's present or future thirst; the excellence of the wine; or any other reason.

The Grim Threat to British Universities

From the New York Review of Books:

The British universities, Oxford and Cambridge included, are under siege from a system of state control that is undermining the one thing upon which their worldwide reputation depends: the caliber of their scholarship. The theories and practices that are driving this assault are mostly American in origin, conceived in American business schools and management consulting firms. They are frequently embedded in intensive management systems that make use of information technology (IT) marketed by corporations such as IBM, Oracle, and SAP. They are then sold to clients such as the UK government and its bureaucracies, including the universities. This alliance between the public and private sector has become a threat to academic freedom in the UK, and a warning to the American academy about how its own freedoms can be threatened.