MITPressLog

Computer Science Education Week's Tuesday Tease

Today's Computer Science Education Week interview is with Jane Margolis and Joanna Goode.  They  both studying gender and race in computer science and looking for ways to broaden participation in computing and are two of the authors of Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing.  Here's a taste of their interview:

How do you think the field of computer science changed over the years?

A decade ago the image of a computer scientist was someone working in isolation, squirreled behind the computer screen, talking to no one but other “number crunchers,” but now because computing is so critical to the innovation in the arts, science, communication, to everything that makes science and culture swing at this moment, the image of computer science is changing, and to be a computer “geek” seems to be much more cool than it used to be. Computer science is not as off on its own as it once was. It is now the discipline that is creating exciting developments across an array of disciplines and professions. As a result, it seems as if an interdisciplinary perspective is much more valued within computer science itself.

Check out the rest of their answers and watch for new interviews all week. 

Celebrate National Computer Science Education Week

Congress has recently passed a resolution  to make the week of December 7th National Computer Science Education week in honor of Grace Hopper’s birthday. To celebrate this event, we asked several scholars about their thoughts on the current state of the field, as well the current state of education in computer science.  First up is Thomas H. Cormen.  He teaches at Dartmouth and is a co-author of Introduction to Algorithms, the third edition is just out.

Here's a taste, but check out the whole interview here:

What kinds of changes (if any) do you think we need to make in computer science education?

Two things make me feel like an old fogey: seeing surfers off Lighthouse Point in Santa Cruz, and thinking about computer science education. Although it's great that students have their own computers now, there was an educational advantage in the old machine room/batch processing model that I grew up with. Because we got very few runs in during the course of an evening, every run of every program was precious. When my program didn't work, I pored over the listing, really trying to understand what was going on. Today's students tend to randomly morph the program until it works, and when they finally get it working, I'm not sure they understand why. (I will confess that's exactly how I write LaTeX macros.) So there are times that I think, not so facetiously, that we should revert to a model where students get to run a program at most once every 20 minutes. My real answer is not that I think we need big changes in computer science education; it's that I think we need students to have a better understanding of what computer science is. Too many think that it's about making websites, or that being a dedicated gamer gives a leg up in learning how to write good programs. We might have been better off in the old days, when students had no idea what computer science was before taking a course in it, than now, when students harbor misinformed ideas about computer science.

And watch for interviews with Jane Margolis and Joanna Goode, Mitchell Wand, Ken Ford, and Bob Harper throughout the week. 

Award News: MLA Publication Awards

Three MIT Press authors will be honored with awards for their books at the upcoming Modern Language Association (MLA) convention. The MLA, the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities (est. 1883), promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the association come from all fifty states, as well as from Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. These awards are three of eighteen awards that will be presented on December 28th during the association's annual convention, held this year in Philadelphia

Below is a list of the awards and the books, along with the committee citation for each of them:

The sixteenth annual Prize for a First Book will be given to Matthew G. Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland, for Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.

Mechanisms is a genuinely original, field-defining contribution to media studies, promising to have a major impact on the fields of literary studies, book history, and digital culture. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum brilliantly puts new media studies into dialogue with book history and textual studies, teaching readers anew how to think about materiality, form, durability, and ephemerality in a digital age, while offering a primer in how to read and teach digital works, including works of literature. The book tracks the fate and transformations of electronic works by William Gibson and Michael Joyce, among others, in a manner somewhere between technical bibliography and detective work. Kirschenbaum engagingly and efficiently educates-and thus may help to produce-a new audience for digital literatures.

The tenth Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters will go to William G. Holzberger for The Letters of George Santayana, Book Seven, 1941-1947 and Book Eight, 1948-1952.

These volumes complete an important project, publishing a scholarly edition of the complete correspondence of George Santayana, a major figure in the history of American philosophy and cultural criticism. The letters cover the last years of Santayana's life-spent in Rome, where he was in effect trapped by World War II-and the years after the war during which he prepared his final publications and was visited by many American admirers. William G. Holzberger admirably documents this period of Santayana's life with carefully edited texts, thoughtful and comprehensive introductions, and supporting notes and apparatuses that are never obtrusive and invariably helpful.

The nineteenth annual Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures will be given to Nicolás Wey Gómez, of Brown University, for The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies.

The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies, by Nicolás Wey Gómez, is already gaining recognition as a landmark study. The book's main argument is supported by an astonishing knowledge of the development of cosmography, geography, history, literature, geometry, astrology, and philosophy. The analysis combines meticulous archival research (in several languages) as well as contemporary theoretical concepts of space and place and the North-South divide. Few would have imagined it possible to say anything new about Columbus or his enterprise, yet Wey Gómez not only says something new, he also challenges the foundation of what is commonly accepted as the logic that conferred legitimacy on the European discovery and colonization of the Americas.

 More information can be found at http://www.mla.org/resources/awards/awards_winners.

World Policy Journal on JSTOR

Good news.  For an additional annual fee of $25, individual subscribers can access issues of World Policy Journal archived on JSTOR (Volumes 1-20, 1983-2003). 

Happy reading...

Access Controlled Poster Censored at IGF Meeting

 A reception hosted by Open Net Initiative (ONI) was rattled by the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF) security, who objected to a poster advertising Access Controlled, which is based on ONI research and due out in March.  "The poster was thrown on the floor and we were told to remove it because of the reference to China and Tibet. We refused, and security guards came and removed it. The incident was witnessed by many," Pakistani delegate, Shahzad Ahmed reported.

The poster promoting Access Controlled was removed by the IGF's organizers because a sentence in the poster apparently violated UN policy. The sentence in question reads, "The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China's famous "Great Firewall of China" is one of the first national Internet filtering systems."

Co-author Ronald Deibert spoke with the BBC about the incident this morning, saying "If we are not allowed to discuss topics such as internet censorship, surveillance and privacy at a forum on internet governance, then what is the point of the IGF?

Professor Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski also posted their comments on YouTube.

Would you go to Art School?

How should artists be educated? And is it worth attending a $35,000-a-year art school so that one graduates in debt into an uncertain market?

The last major change in art education came nearly a century ago, when the German Bauhaus was formed. Today, dramatic changes in the art world, combined with a revolution in information technology, raise fundamental questions about the education of today's artists. Nevertheless, an estimated 30,000 Master of Fine Arts degrees are granted each year.

Those in New York can join a discussion about the future of art schools with the editor and contributors of Art School, a book that looks at these issues. All are invited to join the conversation this Sunday, November 15, in the Rose Auditorium at Cooper Union's incredible new 41 Cooper Square building.

Three conversations will take place, discussing the most pressing issues facing the transmission of cultural knowledge today and for the future. Speakers and moderators include Dennis Adams, Thierry de Duve, Shirin Neshat, Hans Haacke, Boris Groys, Liam Gillick, Saskia Bos, Steven Henry Madoff, Ernesto Pujol, Ute Meta Bauer, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Jeffrey Schnapp, Anton Vidokle, Matthew Higgs, Charles Renfro, Dana Schutz, and Brian Sholis.

Schedule:

1:00 p.m.
Flows of Knowledge, Infections, Temporary States
Steven Henry Madoff, moderator
Ute Meta Bauer
Thierry de Duve
Boris Groys
Jeffrey Schnapp
Anton Vidokle

2:15 p.m.
The Usefulness of the Academy, Learning and Doing—or Nobody Asked You to Do Nothing
Brian Sholis, moderator
Paul Ramirez Jonas
Matthew Higgs
Shirin Neshat
Dana Schutz

3:30 p.m.
Social Context and the Role of the Academy in the 21st Century
Saskia Bos, moderator
Dennis Adams
Liam Gillick
Hans Haacke
Ernesto Pujol
Charles Renfro

Free and open to the public.

Frederick P. Rose Auditorium
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
41 Cooper Square
New York, NY 10003

Miami Book Fair International

The 26th annual Miami Book Fair International kicked off this week, and tomorrow its Street Fair begins. The Street Fair includes the Festival of Authors, with more than 350 authors reading and discussing their work, along with about 250 publishers, booksellers, and exhibitors. A good time should be had by all.

Abdellah Taïa, author of Salvation Army, and one of the "Best 39 Arab Writers Under 40", will be part of the session "An Evening of Francophone Literature" on Friday at 8pm. If you're in the Miami area, be sure to stop by.

Neuroscience 2009

Promotions Coordinator, Allison Hoch, was one of four MIT Pressers manning our booth at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Chicago last month.   Here are some highlights:

Society for Neuroscience is one of my favorite meetings to attend as an exhibitor. The folks at this meeting - all 30,000+ of them - spend plenty of time on the exhibits floor and especially along publisher's row. Our reputation seems to proceed us - our strong history in this field garners us a lot of attention. I love getting to interact with our customers who seem as equally passionate about buying our books as I am about selling them. It was a thrill to attend this conference for the fourth time and be greeted by familiar faces returning to our booth to purchase new titles and beloved favorites for their friends or students.

 
This is the largest conference we attend and one of the longest; my co-workers and I spent a week in Chicago where this year's Society for Neuroscience meeting was held. Two days of travel, one day to set-up, four days of selling, and one day off in-between. The days in the convention center start for us at 8:30 am when we arrive early to set-up our computers and end at 5:30 when we finally close up shop and usher the last straggling customers out of the booth. This year things were so busy that we even brought packed lunches to eat between sales. And we celebrated successful work days with hot pastrami, deep-dish pizza, or one of the famous Illinois "Horseshoe" sandwiches.

This year was a record one for us - we practically sold out of every title we brought. Whether it was our new 30% conference discount or just a hunger for knowledge, we'd be hard-pressed to say, but the economy did not seem to waylay the majority of our customers. As always, our bestseller was Ramon y Cajal's Advice for a Young Investigator but we also saw a lot of interest in our new titles: Charles Gross' A Hole in the Head, Why We Cooperate by Michael Tomasello,  Computational Modeling Methods for Neuroscientists by Erik De Schutter, Wednesday is Indigo Blue by Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman, and of course Michael Gazzaniga's new book (4th) editon of The Cognitive Neurosciences.

Charles Gross Reading in SoCal

MIT Press author and Princeton neuroscientist Charles Gross reads from his latest book, A Hole in the Head tonight at The Book Works in Southern California. If you're in the neighborhood, stop in and listen to this great storyteller.

Another Brick in the Wall?

This coming Monday marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and much hoopla has been planned: a grand public party at the Brandenburg Gate, and a new symbolic falling of the Wall to take place in the form of 1000 giant dominoes that will be toppled along the strip that had once divided East Germany from West. U2’s free on-site concert in Berlin to commemorate the occasion has given rise to some interesting outrage,though: a 2-meter high metal barrier has been installed around where the concert is to take place, in order to block viewing by those who missed out on obtaining any of the 10,000 free tickets. The unpleasant irony of the new barrier points to the contradictions and conflict always to be faced and addressed in any country and political climate when walls are addressed, be they mental or physical. It is in recognition of these contradictions that Semiotext(e) has just rereleased its infamous “German issue,” the 1982 installment of the journal that explored all the invisible walls of suspicion, rebellion, hatred, and hope within the cities of Berlin and New York, with the issue itself serving as a conflict-ridden communicative wall between the two. The German Issue evoked the wall through a horizontal division by means of a visual wall of photographs of the Berlin Wall intermingled with Wall Street. In the journal’s memorable and substantive dialogue between Semiotext(e) founder Sylvère Lotringer and the now deceased German dramatist and author Heiner Müller, Lotringer commented: “The wall of history is totally visible here. I’d rather see it that way than in people’s minds.” As the dominoes tumble this Monday, it is good, then, to reflect on the “Mauer im kopf” [the wall in the head] every political and social nation and body must still contend with. The Wall is down, but a new look at The German Issue raises the question as to whether the “German Issue” may today just be everyone’s issue.