Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Neil McAllister asks, Should computer programming be mandatory for U.S. students? A related article discusses how math skills are suffering in the US, mainly because US culture does not value mathematics and discourages females from pursuing it.
   
   


2. Do you know what Web Science is? Read Nigel Shadbolt and Tim Berners-Lee's article Web Science: Studying the Internet to Protect Our Future.
   

   This new discipline will model the Web’s structure, articulate the architectural principles that have fueled its phenomenal growth, and discover how online human interactions are driven by and can change social conventions. It will elucidate the principles that can ensure that the network continues to grow productively and settle complex issues such as privacy protection and intellectual-property rights.




3. New visualization techniques are being developed at the University of Utah to understand polling data. What struck me was the similarity between their donuts with the ones I developed to summarize reconstructed websites.



4. Leave it to the Japanese to develop a robotic girl that looks like something straight out of a horror movie.
   
   
   Uncanny valley?
   
   


5. This is hilarious. I've never seen more moronic comments than those on YouTube.