Miscellaneous Topics

Java Examples You might have missed:

Losing your Marbles to the Computer (Is it smart?)
Command-line arguments

How Computers Represent Numbers in Binary

Binary Number systems lessons from http://courses.cs.vt.edu/csonline/NumberSystems/Lessons/

Simple Digital Logic: Using logic operators (AND, OR, NOT, XOR, NAND) to implement Addition

Programming Languages

A Brief History of Computers

An introduction to Programming Languages (doc)

Different Kinds of Programming

Logic Programming, such as using the PROLOG language, is very different from what we're used to. You declare rules, which match against a database of facts. The values that allow the rules to match are the output. See the family relationships example (pdf, jpg)

Syntax-free Programming in Alice or Lego Mindstorms. The lines can become blurred between games and programming, such as light-bot. Programming environments can become tools used in scientific visualization (e.g. modelling physics in CrayonPhysics).

Many common programs have built-in macros that allow programming, such as Microsoft Excel

Tools you can Use:

Google (docs, pages, groups), tinyurl.com, graphpaper, NView, PortableApps, Ubuntu, OpenOffice, your own suggestions?

Computer Ethics:

How have computers changed the notion of ownership? See these scenarios.
It's changing how fast?

• Joy: Why the Future Doesn't Need Us (11 pages) published in the April 2000 issue of Wired. The author is Bill Joy, cofounder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems. He was co-chair of the presidential commission on the future of IT research, and is coauthor of The Java Language Specification. (see the notes)
• Kurzweil: Accelerated Living (3 pages) and the notes, and www.kurzweilai.net
• Vinge in the Singularity

What's the big deal about technology anyway?

Is technology giving you more power, or less freedom and less privacy?

See these scenarios.

Computational Thinking, or "Why should I care about computers anyway?"

• What is Computational Thinking? Jeanete Wing's definition (3 page pdf), the center at Carnegie Mellon. This is related to Denning's Great Principles of Computing
• What happens when software goes wrong and is unreliable

Free Online books:

Blown to Bits
You’ll discover ten paradoxical truths about digital data–and learn how those truths are overturning centuries-old assumptions about
privacy, identity, and personal control.
http://www.bitsbook.com/ [click on download tab for pdf]

The Future of the Internet (and How To Stop It)
This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering
precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending
its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.
http://futureoftheinternet.org/ [click on download tab for pdf]
http://yupnet.org/zittrain/ [html version with links to resources]