Stanford University Free Online Course

Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun and Google director of research Peter Norvig are making their artificial intelligence class this fall free to anyone online. The online course will run in tandem with the actual class from October to December, and online students will be expected to watch the lectures, complete the assignments, and take the exams. Although online students will not earn college credit for the class, Thrun and Norvig say they will receive grades and a certificate if they pass it. Since the course was announced in late July, more than 8,000 people have asked to be put on an email list for more details. The researchers want the online students to interact with Stanford's students, and are encouraging that interaction by having the courses run simultaneously. The professors recommend that online students buy the class textbook and dedicate at least 10 hours a week to the course, which is an intermediate-level class, requiring some mathematical and programming knowledge. Norvig says the course might appeal to students at universities that do not offer similar courses, to technology professionals, or to ambitious high-school students.

ParaSail Programming Language

SofCheck's Tucker Taft has developed the Parallel Specification and Implementation Language (ParaSail), a new programming language designed to maximize the potential of multicore computer processors by avoiding the problems associated with multicore chips, such as dividing tasks and sending them to each core in parallel. ParaSail, which will work on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, is similar to the C and C++ programming languages, except that it automatically splits a program into thousands of smaller tasks that can be spread across cores, which allows for the greatest number of tasks to be completed in parallel. ParaSail also automatically debugs the programs, which makes the code safer. "Everything is done in parallel by default, unless you tell it otherwise," Taft says. ParaSail has several other components that are based on older programming languages developed in the 1980s and 1990s for supercomputers. "There are a lot of people chipping away at the problem, taking existing languages and trying to make them better at handling parallel processing," Taft says.

Flocking to Google+ By John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine, July 11, 2011

Although the system has only been open to a few million people, the big well-orchestrated buzz over the past week has been about Google+, the Facebook clone. I'm trying to figure out why this product is so attractive when Google, much like Yahoo, has produced numerous and very similar Facebook clones in the past. Google still supports Orkut, for example. Why wasn't Orkut just upgraded years ago to what is now Google+?

And Google+ is not popular just because of all the early adopters who jump on every new thing are jacked up over it. The influence of these early adopters is questionable. You know who I'm talking about. It's the usual suspects—the online crazy joiners who jump on every new product no matter how sketchy. And, of course, they're led by their ersatz leader, the ubiquitous Scoble, the blogger.

Scoble has become so famous for jumping on board with the first tranche of adopters that he's sort of become one of those one-named "celebrities." He's just Scoble now. What was his first name anyway? Ed? Buddy? Lester? I cannot recall for the life of me. There are others who pile on before most of us ever hear of a product, but Scoble is their leader—although they may not want to admit this.

Generally speaking, the first tranche of reviewers, the Scobalites, tend to like everything unless it is out and out terrible or an awful scam. They act as a crude but liberal filter. This releases the second tranche of mavens. This would be like the Gizmodo folks or David Pogue or the group of professional big-name reviewers, including the ones here at PCMag.com. Now we start to get some insight into the third tranche: common reviewers and pundits with all sorts of opinions.

About now, I come along, with a few other meta reviewers who frankly do not give a crap about this social networking stuff because I'm not 14 anymore. It's up to us to try and figure out what the fuss is about so people can say, "Ah, now THAT actually makes sense." And let's face it, the mania around much of this makes no sense. And, yes, I do bumble around the house moaning when I see someone wasting time on Facebook. But I digress.

I do think I know what is going on, though. First of all, make no mistake, Google is acting like Microsoft did in the 1990s when Netscape came along. Netscape stupidly and aggressively said it was going to kill Microsoft because the browser would be the new OS and everything would be done on the Internet. Microsoft immediately believed this was an actual and credible threat and went to work to destroy Netscape.

Facebook pulled a similar dumb stunt by threatening Google with an assertion that all search will gravitate towards social search and it was implied that Facebook would eventually kill Google. This idea has permeated the scene in a curiously subversive way.

Google began to toy with the social mechanism, with some false starts, and then suddenly Google+ hits the scene and people are analyzing it seriously and paying attention to it. The company also rolled it out like Gmail, meaning it would be limited to the thought leaders first and then ratcheted out to the public. So far everyone is pleased with Google+, and it appears that people are beginning to turn away—somewhat—from Facebook. Why?

I think the reason is simple. All of the complaints about Facebook policies have finally caught up with the company. I noticed this with people who have looked at and reviewed Google+. They all make a comment about how the privacy settings are better or easier to access or less intrusive. This small factor is almost always mentioned. The fact is that Facebook was behaving like a classic monopolist and acting in a highly cavalier manner regarding its users. There was a take it or -leave it attitude. This was compounded by the apparent anti-social arrogance of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

I honestly believe that all the buzz and enthusiasm around this Google product has more to do with a pent-up reaction to Facebook than it does with the Google+ product itself. It's a backlash, if you will. And Google has the extra benefit of Gmail and the ability of users to leverage their contact lists and socialize them quickly. So it's not as if it will take forever to get a network established.

I have no idea how long this honeymoon with Google+ will last, but Facebook needs to be concerned about it and do something to reverse the enthusiasm. Otherwise, it will become yet another flattened dead skunk on the social networking superhighway.

"Social Network" Movie Inspires More Students To Take Computer Courses

After a decade of decreases, computer science programs are experiencing a resurgence, even as politicians warn about the decline of U.S. competitiveness in science, technology, engineering, and math. Educators and technologists say the increased interested in computer science is directly related to the popularity of companies such as Apple and Facebook, as well as The Social Network, the movie depicting the success of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. "It's a national call, a Sputnik moment," says Mehran Sahami, Stanford University's associate chairman for computer science education. The rise in the number of computer science degrees awarded started in 2010, and will reach 11,000 this year, according to the Computing Research Association. In addition, the number of students who are pursuing a computer science degree but have not yet declared their major increased by 50 percent last year. Institutions such as Stanford, and universities of Washington and Southern California, have recently redesigned their computer science curriculums to attract new students. The new curriculums emphasize the vast number of careers that use computer science and focus on teaching its practical applications, instead of just vocational skills such as programming languages, which change quickly. Despite the changes and its renewed popularity, the number of computer science graduates does not come close to filling the available jobs.

I.T. Graduates In Demand

Employers are looking to hire graduates with degrees in computer science more than any other college graduates, according to a new survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). More than 56 percent of computer science majors who have applied for a job have received an offer, giving the major the highest offer rate for the class of 2011. NACE surveyed more than 50,000 college students and found that the job offer rate for computer science graduates has increased 13.8 percent from 2010. Half of engineering graduates who have applied for jobs have received an offer, and the overall job offer rate for 2011 graduates has risen to 41.2 percent from 38.2 percent a year ago. In a separate survey released earlier in the month, NACE reported that computer science graduates were receiving starting salaries of $63,000.

What Makes an Image Memorable?

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed an algorithm that can identify which photos humans will find memorable, based on statistical data taken from a study of people remembering images. The researchers, led by MIT's Phillip Isola, found that the most memorable photos are those that contain people, followed by static indoor scenes and human-scale objects, while landscapes are not as memorable. After gathering the data, the researchers created memorability maps of each image by asking people to label all of the objects in the images. A computer model analyzed the maps to determine which objects make an image memorable. Then the researchers used machine-learning techniques to create a computational model that analyzed the images and their memorability rate, which enabled them to create an algorithm that can predict the memorability of images the computer has not previously analyzed.

I.T. Professionals in High Demand

There are more technology job openings in a single day on Dice's career Web site than there are computer science graduates joining the U.S. workforce, according a Dice Holdings report. The report also found that 18 states have shortages of local graduates compared to job openings, particularly in key tech markets such as Silicon Valley, Seattle, Dallas, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Chicago. The report notes that the gap between graduates and job openings has created competition for talent among tech companies. There are at least two or three jobs for every computer science graduate, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Ann Hunter. " 'America's Tech Talent Crunch' is a snapshot of how businesses, educational institutions, and employees are dealing with palpable shortages in real time," the report says. An earlier Dice report found that, on average, technology professionals had not received salary raises in the last two years. However, "companies can no longer get away with paltry salary increases for their technology staffs based on the demand we are seeing for talent," says Dice's Tom Silver.