The Fun of Scratch

Do you want a fun way to learn the basics of computer programming?
Scratch is a great application for learning how to program in a very visual and intuitive style. Scratch lets everyone create and share simple graphic based programs. It is easy to make pretty pictures and arcade games. Below are two examples that I have created when working with middle and high school students. Just click the green flags to start the programs. Try to land the spaceship on the key on the moon by using just the arrow keys. Enjoy.

Learn more about this project
Learn more about this project

Michael Pollan, Health Stats, and Web Search Unfulfilled

I was reading Michael Pollan's article in today's NYT where he made some very provocative claims about the healthcare debate. His main argument is that there is an "elephant in the room" and that most of the blame for the enormous costs of healthcare in the US can be placed on the fact that Americans are far more likely to be obese.

I thought his piece was an interesting "out of the box" look at the issue, and that an interested person should be able to verify his claim by simple searching the web for health statistics. I immediately thought of using wolframalpha.com which is promoted as a "computational knowledge engine" that I had imagined would give a quick, graphic access to widely available statistics. I tried several searches using keywords like, weight, obesity, BMI - all to no avail. So WolframAlpha appears to be useless for comparative health statistics- too bad. Can any major search engine handle the task? A further search using google came up with several not so satisfactory sites. One was a database the WHO Infobase that was difficult and slow. Another was NationMaster site nationmaster.com which gave chart using OECD stats.

This chart showed that US has obesity rates of over 30% with an industrialized country average of 14%. So in essence Americans are twice as likely to be obese, as they spend twice as much on healthcare. Could more (web) data show a stronger correlation? Pollan may be on the right track in his focus on this aspect of the health debate. And here come those corporate interests that he predicted would fight any changes to food industry practices.

Computers, Corn, and Copyright: The Cases of Moe Parr and Joel Tenenbaum

Intellectually property law, including copyright and patents, is being used (in the US) with increasing virulence to victimize individuals, at a time when our culture should be celebrating the freedom and openness that new technologies in computing and biology can bring.

This idea is illustrated in the documentary movie Food Inc., where lawyers from Monsanto are shown putting patent law to work to monopolize agriculture, and in their wake are tearing apart rural America and destroying the lives of individuals. For example the movie highlights the case of Maurice (Moe) Parr, a seed cleaner from Indiana, who was harassed and financially ruined by Monsanto legal action. The entire profession of seed cleaning seems to have been undone. Here is a discussion-board on Monsanto's support of seed cleaners.

Then there is the case of Joel Tenenbaum, a file-sharing student whose entire family was threatened and harassed by RIAA law team. The link above leads to very interesting discussion of the law suit and many related copyright cases and the unjust targeting by corporate lawyers.

No matter how the merits of law are argued, the principle of respecting people's privacy must be paramount. If the enforcement of a law means invading a family farm or confiscating a personal hard-drive, then the law needs to change. Moe and Joel represent a growing number of people that need to be supported and not victimized by sleazy corporate interests.


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What is eating your disk? -> % du | sort -n

My sweet sister (happy b-day!) read my blog and suggested the following entry. How do to tell what is eating up a hard disk drive on a Mac. Well here is my solution that uses a simple "unix-style" command in the "Terminal" utility window. One way to get to the Terminal window is to search for it by going to the "spotlight" found at upper right corner of desktop. Once your Terminal window is up and running simply type in "du | sort -n ". Translation: du lists all files with the size of file in each line. We | "say pipe" that output to the sort command. The end of the final output will be the largest files and directories in your system. Now delete those directories you no longer need.

When you just need a table of results -> Google Squared

Keeping up with different search engines and search methods is a challenge. Google has a new application called "Google squared" that will build you a table of search results. Sometimes it gives poor results, but other searches work quite nicely, particularly for topics that have obvious lists.

Here are some examples where GS produces good results:
1. reality TV shows
2. fire island accomodations
3. blues musicians
4. sports cars


Here are some examples where GS produces poor results:
1. english rugby clubs
2. united states senators
3. ohio farmers markets
4. graphic artists

Twitter Searches -> Google Reader or Blog

Recently my son put up a tweet in which he complained about poor internet service by Cincinnati Bell. He soon after received a message by a company representative pointing him to customer service support. Follow-up messages were also sent to him. So apparently people/companies are following twitter carefully. So I wanted to try it myself. Here is my solution to get easy updates:

1. go to search.twitter.com and type in a keyword to follow, such as "Cincinnati"
2. at the top right of the results you will see a link "Feed for this query"
3. add this feed to your Google Reader or to your Blog (as you will see on right, I did this by adding an rss gadget in blog layout) and then follow what people are saying on Twitter.

Update: after speaking to some high-school students it appears that Twitter is not all that popular among young people, as compared to say Facebook. Whether spam will eventually kill Twitter is still an open question. I think filtering spam from Twitter may be a harder problem than filtering webpage search results.

Computer Myth #1

Myth #1. Security and Antivirus Software Is The Best Defense Against Computer Viruses

The Facts: Security software is often out-of-date and it provides a false sense of security to users. A better approach is to be a "virus-aware" computer user by following these simple steps:
1. always update your operating system software using Windows or Mac software updates.
2. avoiding suspicious websites that do not "look right"
3. deleting suspicious emails - if you don't recognize the sender you probably don't want it.
4. when your suspicions are raised but you are just not sure, you can check and search websites like snopes.com that list well known hoaxes.