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Late this month due to an extended stay in Kuala Lumpur for the Malaysian general elections. Here are the three articles I’ve managed to glean from around the web in April.

• This article from the Pacific Standard magazine covers a paper whose authors examined the obituaries of over 1,000 famous people published in The New York Times to determine if there are any patterns in them. They found that the famous people who died earliest were athletes, performers and non-performers who worked in creative fields. The famous people who died later were politicians, businessmen and military officers. The tentative conclusion is that people who work in sports and the performing arts incur psychological and physical costs that curtail their lifespan.
• Here’s a link to a paper claiming that vervet monkeys were able to solve a multiplayer coordination “game” in which a captive monkey was trained to open a container holding a large amount of food, but only if the dominant monkeys of a wild troop stayed outside of an imaginary circle away from the food. The wild monkeys were able to infer the correct behavior by observing the trained monkey and receiving feedback from the trained monkey without the intervention of humans.
• The Economist has an article talking about the tells that give players away when playing say a game of poker. Most people instinctively believe that the key to not giving away information about the hand you’re holding to other players is in keeping a straight face. As it turns out, experiments show that observers achieve a much higher success rate at correctly predicting the quality of a hand of cards held by another person not by looking at the player’s face but by looking at the player’s hands. This is sure to be a result that will revolutionize poker playing strategies.

One of the MOOC courses I’m taking on Coursera, Learn to Program: Crafting Quality Code, has effectively ended. It was taught by professors Jennifer Campbell and Paul Gries of the University of Toronto. It is by a large margin, the most disappointing of the online courses I’ve taken so far. What follows is a long post that I wrote on the official forums explaining why I was disappointed with the quality of the course:

This post will probably be unpopular. Judging from the tone of the posts in this forum, this course seems to be well-liked by many students. Yet I note that for many of these posters the first Learn to Program, which I did not take, appears to have been their very first programming course. I disagree with that assessment and have a low opinion of the quality and usefulness of this course. I started this thread to set out my reasons for holding this opinion.

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I’ve been busy with programming stuff since Algorithms II just started up. The first assignment involved processing WordNet graphs. The second assignment involved implementing seam carving, also known as content-aware resizing. Anyway that’s why I’ve been browsing less lately and so have fewer articles. Here we go:

• IBM’s Watson supercomputer made the news in 2011 when it won a special Jeopardy! tournament against human champions. This article covers some of the first commercial applications it is being used for, helping doctors to diagnose diseases in various hospitals in the United States. It also talks about how its size has since shrunk from that of a bedroom to that of a bathroom and how it could eventually be a handheld device. Cool note: Watson uses Princeton’s WordNet to help it parse and understand the English language.
• In other computer news, the next big thing in computing is supposed to be quantum computers, and it has been for a while now but actual implementations have proved as elusive as nuclear fusion. This article talks about just such an implementation. It will be used by Lockheed Martin to “create and test complex radar, space and aircraft systems“, i.e. make weapons and works at temperatures close to absolute zero.
• The next article is about Russian scientists discovering completely unknown forms of bacterial life deep under the Antarctic ice. The samples come from the underground Lake Vostok, a body of water that lies 3,700 meters under the ice and is thought to have been isolated from the rest of the planet for millions of years. Needless to say the Internet is waiting to see if they have awakened Cthulhu or dug up The Thing.
• Finally we have an article about research into whether or not smiling before matches in the Ultimate Fighting Championships affects the chances of the martial artists’ success. Pre-match photographs of the two combatants were analyzed for the presence and intensity of smiles and matched with the results of each fight. The researches found that as expected, fighters who smile and smile more intensely, lose more often. There are various plausible explanations though none are proven. It could be that smiles are an involuntary sign of submission, or that smiling fighters simply aren’t as aggressive.

So the Programming Languages course is just about over. There’s actually one peer assessment yet to go and it will probably be a few weeks until the course staff tabulates and releases the results, but all of the serious work is over. I wanted to get this post written before I start on two new courses next week. It’s run by Dan Grossman of the University of Washington and ran for 10 weeks. This course used a slightly different schedule than other Coursera courses which usually had weekly sections. For this course, the eight course sections were spread out over the ten weeks so we didn’t have a predictable schedule of when each section would be released.

The course used three different languages, starting with SML for the first four sections, Racket for the next two sections and ending with Ruby for the final two sections. There was a programming assignment for each section, with exception of section 4 when we had a mid-term exam. At the end of it all, we have the final exam which is still ongoing as of the time of writing. There were no other quizzes though each section’s programming assignment had to be submitted twice. Once to the autograding system to test for correctness and once again to the peer assessment system to check for style issues and correctness isssues for which it was difficult to get the autograder to test for. One cool thing is that most of the programming assignments have optional challenge questions which award a small number of bonus points for a comparatively huge amount of extra work, just for those who want to run the extra mile.

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Due to the Chinese New Year festivities in February, I had less time to browse around for science articles so only three of them this month:

• This article in The New York Times covers some very preliminary work on how brain signals can be transferred from one laboratory rat to stimulate another rat to perform an action intended by the original rat. It’s as if the original rat were remote-controlling the other rat, in this case made even more impressive by the fact that the signals were encoded and transmitted over the Internet from one rat to another. As the article goes on to note it is very simplistic and the responses were correct only slightly more often than random chance, but it’s still a step in an intriguing direction.
• The next one is from Wired which discusses how dolphins may have personal names of their own, called signature whistles, and may address each other by these names. This suggests that dolphins are able to learn specific signals, as opposed to intuitive ones, and use them to communicate, all without the intervention or guidance of human handlers.
• Finally this last one from The Atlantic comes with a video must be seen to be believed. It pulls the wraps off DARPA’s 1.8 Gigapixel video camera that can cover pretty much the entire area of a medium-sized city with enough resolution to spot a person waving their arms on the ground. That’s some serious Big Brother surveillance capability there.

I’ve been remiss in updating due to being busy on the Coursera site. I’m currently taking the Programming Languages course from Dan Grossman of the University of Washington. It has a strong focus on functional programming, a paradigm that is completely new to me. It’s pretty amazing to learn about these powerful programming idioms that don’t yet exist in mainstream languages.

Meanwhile I am also serving as a Community TA for the current run of Princeton’s Algorithms 1 course. Apparently I got the invitation due to good grades and being active in the forums during the first run of the course. It basically means playing the role of moderator on the official forums and helping students with explanations and basic problem solving when appropriate. It’s sometimes disheartening to note how many students don’t understand basic instructions, for example, like zipping two files is not the same as putting the two files in a folder and zipping that folder. But it’s also great to see students work on the same problems that I spent time on last year, sometimes with results that surprise me.

For those curious, we get moderator powers and can view some personal details of students. We also gain access to a TA-only forum in which instructors and TAs from all of the courses on the platform can interact. We also regularly interact with the course instructor by e-mail. But we have no special behind-the-scenes access to the nuts-and-bolts of the system. So fixing stuff like broken autograders, server outages and the like are done only by Coursera engineers.

Finally if you’re not yet into the MOOC scene, here’s a recent post on the official Coursera blog announcing a huge expansion plan. Those in Asia may be interested in knowing some of the new universities that have signed up include the National Taiwan University and the National University of Singapore. Courses in more languages than just English should be available soon, including some in Chinese. In fact I should be taking a couple of courses on C++ later this year in French simply because they are the only C++ courses on the platform currently available and it is kind of embarrassing not to know the standard language most widely in use in industry.

The first month of 2013 has been particularly fruitful so we have a mixed bag of various science related articles. Here goes:

• We’ll start with the most important piece of news that made the rounds this month, though more often in editorial than science circles. This Mother Jones article, one of many on the topic, talks about a new explanation of the perplexing rise in America’s crime rate in the 1960s to 1970s and its equally perplexing fall in the 1990s. The answer apparently lies in the use of lead in ordinary petrol. Childhood exposure to lead when it was a common component of petrol in the 1940s and 1950s caused brain damage that subsequently led to increased crime when these children grew up twenty years later. The subsequent shift to unleaded petrol resulted in a new generation who were never exposed, hence the fall in crime rates.
• Similarly the next article isn’t so much news from scientists as a recent topic of discussion among economists. In the face of much talk about whether or not innovation has slowed down compared to the past, the blog Sociological Speculation proposes one obvious low-hanging fruit that could dramatically improve human productivity: a way to reduce or entirely eliminate the human need to sleep. The article is more about the effects of such a revolution rather than any specific technology but it does mention Modafinil. A quick check on Malaysia’s own Lowyet.net forums reveals that even Malaysians are asking about its availability, meaning that there is genuine interest in using technological means to wrest more hours out each day.
• Next a couple of lighter articles on psychology. First is an article from the BPS Research Digest about how people who are more easily digusted really do have a heightened ability to spot dirt, even if the said dirt is nothing but simulated grey shades on a white background.
• Then this article from the New York Times covers a cognitive bias that upon introspection seems quite odd, called the end of history illusion. People readily look back upon their past selves and admit how different they were from how they are now. Yet when asked how they expect their future selves to be, they seem to think that it will be more or less like what they are currently. In other words, it seems as if people lock-in their present states and project that into the future, regardless how old they currently are. Yet the evidence is that people never stop changing and your future self is likely to be as different from what you are currently as you are now different from your past self.
• We end this post with a couple of links to just plain cool stuff. This piece of news talks about a military laser recently tested by a German company. It was capable of slicing through 15 mm steel from a kilometer away and accurate enough to shoot down drones that were falling at 50 meters per second from two kilometers away. And remember for every bit of this type of news that makes it out to the general public, you can be sure that there are plenty more that are kept under wraps.
• Finally this article from NBC covers what is billed as the largest structure in the universe. It is a structure composed of 73 quasars with supermassive black holes at its centre and is 4 billion light years across at its widest point. Our own Milky Way galaxy is only about 100,000 light years wide.