Computational thinking is a fundamental skill for everyone, not just for computer scientists. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child’s analytical ability. Just as the printing press facilitated the spread of the three Rs, what is appropriately incestuous about this vision is that computing and computers facilitate the spread of computational thinking.

Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior, by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Computational thinking includes a range of mental tools that reflect the breadth of the field of computer science.

Computational Thinking

Historian David McCullough has said that all teachers of history should be trained storytellers. But there are some stories that Americans would rather not hear.

From last month:

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both “an idea and a cause”.

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.

But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

From today:

The key demographic – unaffiliated 40+ white voters in the swing states – may be pulled in two different directions. On the one hand, many of them clearly have an instinctive dislike of Barack Obama, because of his sanctimony, his cool demeanour, or because of the colour of his skin. On the other hand, many of them also appear to have developed (if recent state and congressional results are anything to go by) an instinctive dislike of the Republican Party, because of its complete inability to govern successfully. It will be interesting to see which set of associations gets more firmly entrenched by November, because that is what will decide the election. My guess is that people will divide pretty evenly on this question, as the party machines prod them from both sides, and that the final result will be extremely close. What is certain is that the surrounding noise will not diminish, and there will doubtless be a poll to suit every taste, and an elegant piece of analysis to suit every hope. The democratic conversation will continue, but it’s not the one that Dewey had in mind. People are talking, but no one is really listening. For all the fun and fantasy that can be had following this election on the internet, the overriding impression it gives after a while is of tuning into thousands of people as they sit in their cars and complain about the traffic.

Why Didn't We Listen to Their War Stories?

Standing before an audience of about 25 academics, all professors and graduate students specializing in the Middle Ages, in a chilly classroom on the vast campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Jeff Persels, a lanky associate professor of French and director of European studies at the University of South Carolina, was reading aloud a scholarly paper at the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies. The paper's title was "The Wine in the Urine: Managing Human Waste in French Farce." The paper was about, well, the wine in the urine, or perhaps the urine in the wine. Its topic is a 15th-century farce, or lowlife comic drama, about an adulterous wife who uses a wine bottle as an impromptu chamber pot, with predictably gross results involving her husband and her lover.

A Dark Age for Medievalists

I'm a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). My research background is in online games and immersive virtual reality. I am interested in social interaction and self-representation in virtual environments. You can find out more about my work and what I do for fun with the links on the right.

Nick Yee's HomePage

Wednesday Yahoo announced they have a built a petascale, distributed relational database. In Yahoo Claims Record With Petabyte Database, the details are thin but they built on the PostgreSQL relational database system. In Size matters: Yahoo claims 2-petabyte database is world's biggest, busiest, the system is described as an over 2 petabyte repository of user click stream and context data with an update rate for 24 billion events per day. Waqar Hasan, VP of Engineering at Yahoo! Data group, describes the system as updated in real time and live – essentially a real time data warehouse where changes go in as they are made and queries always run against the most current data. I strongly suspect they are bulk parsing logs and the data is being pushed into the system in large bulk units but, even near real time at this update rate, is impressive.

The original work was done at a Seattle startup called Mahat Technologies acquired by Yahoo! in November 2005.

Petascale SQL DB at Yahoo!

A new wave of activists wants to celebrate atypical brain function as a positive identity, not a disability. Opponents call them dangerously deluded.

The New Wave of Autism Rights Activists

If, as now seems almost certain, it will be McCain v. Obama in the autumn, hopes will be raised again for a real debate about the issues, between two principled candidates. These hopes will then be dashed as the campaign settles back into the associative groove, and spews out electronic reams of associative comment bemoaning that this should be so. There is at least some uncertainty at this stage in knowing which particular associations will be decisive. The key demographic – unaffiliated 40+ white voters in the swing states – may be pulled in two different directions. On the one hand, many of them clearly have an instinctive dislike of Barack Obama, because of his sanctimony, his cool demeanour, or because of the colour of his skin. On the other hand, many of them also appear to have developed (if recent state and congressional results are anything to go by) an instinctive dislike of the Republican Party, because of its complete inability to govern successfully. It will be interesting to see which set of associations gets more firmly entrenched by November, because that is what will decide the election. My guess is that people will divide pretty evenly on this question, as the party machines prod them from both sides, and that the final result will be extremely close. What is certain is that the surrounding noise will not diminish, and there will doubtless be a poll to suit every taste, and an elegant piece of analysis to suit every hope. The democratic conversation will continue, but it’s not the one that Dewey had in mind. People are talking, but no one is really listening. For all the fun and fantasy that can be had following this election on the internet, the overriding impression it gives after a while is of tuning into thousands of people as they sit in their cars and complain about the traffic.

The Cattle-Prod Election

I finally got to see Topo's presentation this week-end at PH-Neutral and discuss it with him and FX.

Given that the slides aren't online yet [1], that Core hasn't published Topo's technical paper on their website [2] yet either, and that I'm done replying to direct inquiries about it [3], here's a summary of the IOS rootkit saga and its impact on the Service Provider community (from my point of view :)

Topo spent a lot of time (and if you ever loaded an IOS image in IDA you know what I'm talking about) analyzing strings and functions in IOS. In his proof of concept he located the code doing the password check and adds a trampoline to his backdoor code (by saving paramaters, glueing the two codes together, doing the "new" password check and returning properly to the main code path). Nice lesson on 101 hooking on IOS.

IOS Rookit: the sky isn't falling (yet)

As the Web continues to evolve and more of our lives move online, we believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information.

One important area for exploration is the blending of the desktop and the Web through deeper integration of the browser with online services.

We’re now launching a new project within Mozilla Labs to formally explore this integration. This project will be known as Weave and it will focus on finding ways to enhance the Firefox user experience, increase user control over personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences.

Just like Mozilla enables massive innovation by making Firefox open on many levels, we will aim to do the same with Weave by developing an open extensible framework for services integration.

Mozilla Labs: Introducing Weave

Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) studies how to establish secure communication between two remote parties solely based on their shared password, without requiring a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). Despite extensive research in the past decade, this problem remains unsolved. Patent has been one of the biggest brakes in deploying PAKE solutions in practice. Besides, even for the patented schemes like EKE and SPEKE, their security is only heuristic; researchers have reported some subtle but worrying security issues. In this paper, we propose to tackle this problem using an approach different from all past solutions.

Our protocol, Password Authenticated Key Exchange by Juggling (J-PAKE), achieves mutual authentication in two steps: first, two parties send ephemeral public keys to each other; second, they encrypt the shared password by juggling the public keys in a verifiable way. The first use of such a juggling technique was seen in solving the Dining Cryptographers problem in 2006. Here, we apply it to solve the PAKE problem, and show that the protocol is zero-knowledge as it reveals nothing except one-bit information: whether the supplied passwords at two sides are the same. With clear advantages in security, our scheme has comparable efficiency to the EKE and SPEKE protocols.

J-PAKE: From Dining Cryptographers to Jugglers