Group items tagged

I felt that this article was particularly well written because of how conversational the author was with the reader. The conversational aspect allows the scientific aspect of the article to be better understood, in a way. The use of a video was also allowed for a better understanding of the physics.

I was thinking about doing this one! I curled for a couple of winters, and always wondered about the weirdly illogical physics of curling stones. Unfortunately, the nearest curling club is 3 hours away in Knoxville...

This writer did a good job of keeping an informal tone without being too casual. It was an easy read and they connected the topic to other areas of science. The little bit of humor was a really nice touch too!

Good link from Khan Academy that has good practice questions/explanation of the Vigenere cipher.

This resource is interesting in light of our discussing Babbage and Lovelace, as well as Ada Lovelace Day. This article is particularly interesting to me as it deals with women's contributions to significant advancements in history, many of which are often ignored or excused.

Riley, I mentioned in class that October 14th is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day for recognizing the contributions of women in science. Details: http://findingada.com/. I've wanted to organize an Ada Lovelace Day event here at Vanderbilt for a few years now, but never found the time. Let me know if you'd like to cook something up (an event? a blog series? a Wikipedia editing party?) for the 14th.

I found it really interesting that people took the fact that Lovelace made a few mistakes as an excuse to try to remove her contribution to computer programming. Male scientists and programmers also make mistakes, but we rarely see those used in an attempt to discredit them. Also, she literally designed a computer program before the computer even existed. I think we can excuse a few past mathematical errors.

About the same time we talked about the Ahmed Mohamed story during class yesterday, this happened.

The International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) is a non-profit scientific organization whose purpose is to further research in cryptology and related fields. Cryptology is the science and practice of designing computation and communication systems which are secure in the presence of adversaries.

How have humans protected their secret messages through history? What has changed today?

This article gives a method for generating secure yet easy to remember passwords for online accounts, using encryption and modular arithmetic (!). It is an interesting use of encryption in everyday life for something we all have, password-protected internet accounts. If you click through to the computer science category, you can find other posts on cryptography, encryption, and privacy.