The Educational CyberPlayGround Educational CyberPlayGround

 

Computer Languages

MACHINE LANGUAGE

"Therefore it's name was called Babel, there the Lord confused the language of all the earth." ~ Genesis 11:9

Rough Timeline of Web Technologies span.year

HTML5 ~ = HTML + CSS + JS APIs

 

JS APIs

New Selectors
Finding elements by class (DOM API)

var el = document.getElementById('section1'); el.focus();
var els = document.getElementsByTagName('div'); els[0].focus();
var els = document.getElementsByClassName('section'); els[0].focus();

Finding elements by CSS syntax (Selectors API)

var els = document.querySelectorAll("ul li:nth-child(odd)");
var els = document.querySelectorAll("table.test > tr > td");

 

 

NSA posts secrets to writing secure code
Tokeener case study serves as an example of writing low-defect, highly-reliable code, researchers claim. By Joab Jackson
The National Security Agency has released a case study showing how to cost-effectively develop code with zero defects. If adopted widely, the practices advocated in the case study could help make commercial software programs more reliable and less vulnerable to attack, the researchers of the project conclude.
The case study is the write-up of an NSA-funded project carried out by the U.K.-based Praxis High Integrity Systems and Spre Inc. NSA commissioned the project, which involved writing code for an access control system, to demonstrate high-assurance software engineering.
With NSA's approval, Praxis has posted the project materials, such as requirements, security target, specifications, designs and proofs. The code itself, called Tokeneer, has also been made freely available. The Tokeneer project is a milestone in the transfer of program verification technology into industrial application," said Sir Tony Hoare, noted Microsoft Research computer scientist, in a statement. "Publication of the full documents for the project has provided unprecedented experimental material for yet further development of the technology by pure academic research.
Developing code with very few defects has long been viewed as a difficult and expensive task, according to a 2006 paper by Praxis engineers describing the work that was published in the International Symposium on Signals, Systems and Electronics. For this project, three Praxis engineers wrote 10,000 lines of code in 260 person-days, or about 38 lines of code per day. After the project was finished, a subsequent survey of the code found zero defects.
Moreover, Tokeneer meets or exceeds the Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 5, researchers said. Common Criteria is an ISO-recognized set of software security requirements established by government agencies and private companies. Industry observers have long concluded that it would be too expensive for commercial software companies to write software programs that would meet EAL 5 standards.
According to the 2006 paper, the engineering team used a number of different techniques for writing the code, all bundled into a methodology they call Correctness by Construction, which emphasizes precise documentation, incremental developmental phases, frequent verification and use of a semantically unambiguous language.
The developers wrote the code in a subset of the Ada programming language called SPARK, [Ada was named for Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron. ] which allows for annotations that permit static analysis of the program. They used the GNAT Pro integrated developer environment software from AdaCore.

 

Learn about Tonal language speakers. - There are 2 kinds of languages, one that uses pitch and the other doesn't. If your are a tonal language speaker how do you use a computer to type pitch? Linguist Jeff Allen suggests: Tones in Ijo... http://www.bisharat.net/A12N/tones.htm

December 22 1845: The voice synthesiser Euphonium, is demonstrated to the public in Philadelphia. Using reeds, bellows and chambers to simulate the anatomy of the human speech organs, it is said to have been able to produce 16 syllables.

NATURAL LANGUAGE SEARCH ENGINES - We are all natural language searchers
Barney Pell's Powerset CoFounder, Lorenzo Thione argues that we are all natural language searchers. He surveyed the underlying themes in much of the criticism in the current blogstorm about Powerset and natural language search. read about http://tinyurl.com/create.php
and http://shurl.org/language

MACHINE LANGUAGE AND Artificial Intelligence - AI

Index of Machine Learning Courses. Maintained by Vasant Honavar, Artificial Intelligence Research Group, Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University.

Natural Language Processing Course Listing, part of the 2004 NLP Course Survey conducted by ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics).

A Brief History of Programming Languages
This timeline covers innovations in languages used for programming computers from 1946-1995. Entries include the development of FORTRAN  (mathematical FORmula TRANslating system) in 1957, COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) created in 1959, Bill Gates and Paul Allen's version of BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) in 1975, and more.

A curious chapter in AI history, where researcher Kenneth Colby used the Turing Test to see whether psychiatrists could distinguish between delusional patients and his natural language paranoia simulator 'PARRY'.
PARRY was designed by Colby, who was both a psychiatrist and computer scientist, in an attempt to simulate the psychology of paranoia. In particular, the programme was designed to replicate paranoid delusions about being persecuted by the Mafia. Dennett's 1990 article, entitled "Can machines think?", discusses whether the Turing Test is an adequate test of machine intelligence. Dennett notes that PARRY is the only programme known to have passed the Turing Test - psychiatrists were unable to distinguish between real patients and simulated ones.

Morse_Code is really just learning to understand English plus some ham radio idioms.

Braille - learning to understand English as expressed in Morse Code, plus some local dialect.

COMPUTER KEYBOARD LANGUAGE
Peter Wilkness of the CATANAL project (for native Alaskan languages) SEE Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights

Hou tu pranownse Inglish with a sample lexicon and a set of spelling rules which you can use with my Sound Change Applier to automatically derive the pronunciation.

MIT OpenCourseWare: "a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OCW supports MIT's mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century." Courses are offered for example:

Computerate adj. Computer literate.

Greg Ulmer, an English professor at the University of Florida, says universities must "teach students to be as computerate as they are literate." His students use hypertext and multimedia elements in their writing assignments, he adds.

How people invent new words that become part of a language


 

Find where the word CyberSpace comes from a book by William Gibson called Neuromancer this s where the term "cyberspace" was first coined. Read both Neuromancer (chapter 1 ) and Snowcrash.

John Barlow
Rancher and lyricist of the Grateful Dead who applied the word Cyberspace to the internet. also see EFFs Open Audio License (OAL)

Michael Hauben Invented the word "Netizen"

Ted Nelson the inventor of "hypertext"

Ralph E. Griswold passed away October 4, 2006
He became a member of the Programming Research Department at Bell Laboratories in 1962, where he started research on symbolic computation and the design and implementation of high-level programming languages for non-numeric computation. This work led to the development of the first SNOBOL language. Subsequent work led to the SNOBOL4 programming language, which is still in use today. Mike Radow and Ed Feustel have started a SNOBOL mail list that will replace the defunct list on mercury.dsu.edu. It is being hosted by yahoogroups under the name snobol.

Find the origin of SURF THE NET

WHEN unwanted email first came along, people invented different words for it, such as unsolicited email and junk email. But eventually "spam" became the word of choice to describe the phenomenon.
It's a process that happens each time a new thing needs a name, but language researchers have struggled to model how it happens without a central decision maker. Now a computer model shows the process at work - and may give insights into how the first human languages emerged.
Luc Steels of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris in France and his colleagues studied the "naming game", a simple computer model that reflects how people invent words and use them. In the game, a group of "agents" live in a virtual environment with a number of "objects". Each agent makes up random names for the objects, and the agents then interact in pairs, trying to "talk" about those objects.
In each interaction, one agent (the speaker) says its word for an object, while the second agent (the hearer) listens. If the hearer fails to recognize the word, it memorizes it as a possible name for the object. But if the hearer understands the word, both agents retain this word in memory and ditch any others they have made up or heard.
Repeated over and over again, this process reflects how people invent and share new words for objects: they constantly invent new words, yet can only use ones that others understand, so it keeps a lid on the number of words in use.
The simulations showed that this is enough for the emergence of a unique shared vocabulary. In the model, each object always ends up being described by just one word.
"The model is as simple as possible," says Steels. "But it captures the main ingredients of how a population develops an efficient communication system." So could a similar process have helped the historical emergence of human languages?
"Absolutely," says linguist James Hurford of the University of Edinburgh, UK. But he emphasizes that in addition to common words, human language also requires richer structures such as grammar, the emergence of which the model cannot yet explain.
While Steels and colleagues hope to develop more complex models capable of evolving grammar, they already see potential applications in computing. For instance, programmers currently have to establish standards to get commercial or scientific databases to communicate effectively. It may soon be possible to get computers to talk to one another by letting them evolve a common language on their own.

NERD
Most likely born as a nonsense word in the mind of Dr. Seuss' 1950 book, "If I Ran the Zoo."
"And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!"

GOOGLE
In the 1930s, mathematician Edward Kasner asked his 9-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, what he thought would be a good word to describe a large number Milton suggested the word "googol."

YAHOO
Coined by Jonathan Swift in his 1726 satire "Gulliver's Travels" meaning unsophisticated

BUG
Adm. Grace Hopper of the U.S. Navy, a computing pioneer and the inventor of the COBOL programming language, told a story in which an operator solved a glitch in Harvard's Mark II computer by removing an insect a BUG from one of its relays. Edison, used the word bug to describe a problem in his phonograph. The Oxford English Dictionary cites this quotation from the March 11, 1889, issue of the Pall Mall Gazette: "Mr. Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering "a bug" in his phonograph -- an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble."

SECRET LANGUAGE

PollyGlotto Website Language Conversion Tool
An animated talking language translator. It's a mashup between Google Translate and SitePal.

 

IT & GLOBAL DIVERSITY

Language identification and IT: Addressing problems of linguistic diversity on a global scale*
Peter Constable and Gary Simons, SIL International
Abstract Many processes used within information technology need to be customized to work for specific languages. For this purpose, systems of tags are needed to identify the language in which information is expressed. Various systems exist and are commonly used, but all of them cover only a minor portion of languages used in the world today, and technologies are being applied to an increasingly diverse range of languages that go well beyond those already covered by these systems. Furthermore, there are several other problems that limit these systems in their ability to cope with these expanding needs. This paper examines five specific problem areas in existing tagging systems for language identification, and proposes a particular solution that covers all the world’s languages while addressing all five problems.

See this extensive resource provided by Asia Pacific Computer Services.

 

SECRET LANGUAGE CRYPTOGRAPHY CODE TALKERS BREAKERS

 

OBITS: David Shulman "Sherlock Holmes of "Americanisms" / Code Talker
During World War II, he cracked Japanese secret codes for the Army, then returned to puzzles. He was a founder of the American Cryptogram Association, http://www.cryptogram.org/
in 1976 published "An Annotated Bibliography of Cryptography," still used by experts. {1}

Shulman, David. A Glossary of Cryptography. New York: 1981. [Petersen]
He was a champion scrabble player, and wrote a scholarly article about the  game's lexicography. ~ KE
OBITS: David Shulman
November 7, 2004
DAVID Shulman, a self-described Sherlock Holmes of "Americanisms" who dug through obscure, often crumbling publications to hunt down the first use of thousands of words, died last week in Brooklyn. He was 91.
His name appeared in the front matter to OED's epochal second edition, each of the Addition Series volumes and is currently on the website.
Shulman avoided excessive modesty, letting it drop that he was, at least temporarily, the last word on words that included "The Great White Way," "Big Apple," "doozy" and "hoochie-coochie".
Shulman's most pioneering effort concerned the term "hot dog". He found the word was college slang before it was a sausage, paving the way for deeper investigation.
Shulman obliterated a big impediment to finding the origins of the word "jazz" by proving it was on a 1919 record, not the 1909 version of the same disk. (Other scholars traced first use of the term to the baseball columns of Scoop Gleeson, a sports reporter writing in the San Francisco Bulletin in 1913.)
Shulman was first to challenge that "shyster" derived from a lawyer named Scheuster. Others, particularly Roger Mohovich, then traced the etymology to 1843 -1844. "Shyster" turned out to be a Yiddish corruption of a German vulgarism meaning a crooked lawyer.
Every inch of Shulman, from his well-worn trainers to his plastic bag crammed with scrawled notes to his soiled baseball cap, suggested the classic New York eccentric. He recorded his finds on index cards, sending them to the OED when he accumulated 100.
David Shulman was born on 12 November, 1912, and grew up on the Lower East Side speaking Yiddish, according to an interview in the Jerusalem Report in 1999. The first library of which he became a member was a branch in the Bronx.
After City College, he devised puzzles and puzzle contests for newspapers. During the Second World War, he cracked Japanese secret codes for the army, then returned to puzzles.
He was a founder of the American Cryptogram Association and in 1976 published An Annotated Bibliography of Cryptography, still used by experts. He was a champion scrabble player and wrote a scholarly article about the
game's lexicography.
After a heart attack in his early 80's, Shulman gave beloved possessions to the New York Public Library. Gifts included a primer from Colonial America, 20,000 century-old postcards and Bowery Boys novels the library did not have. He earlier donated his cryptography collection, including a book about secret writing from 1518.
His mentor at the library was Norbert Pearlroth, a famed researcher for Ripley's Believe It or Not!. However, Shulman later came to view him as less than rigorous.
"Instead of believing it," he said in an interview in 1999. "I believed it not."
Shulman never married; indeed, he made it clear he had scant time for his only relatives, two nieces who tried to stop him from giving his treasures to the library. "I hate to say it, but your relatives can be predators," he said in the 1999 interview.
Shulman always insisted that the persnickety pickiness he exemplified rates among the supreme virtues.
"What difference does it make?" he sputtered in an interview in 1989. "Why, the same difference as being literate or illiterate, accurate or inaccurate, telling the truth or spreading yarns."


Samuel Billison Code Talker November 18, 2004
WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. (AP) - Samuel Billison, a Navajo who as a Marine during World War II helped invent a secret code based on the tribal language to confound the Japanese, died Wednesday of a heart problem, according to the Navajo Nation.
Billison didn't have a birth certificate, but he was born on a reservation in the mid-1920s. He was believed to be 78.
Billison and other Navajo Marines, called the Code Talkers, used the code and their native language to communicate troop movements and orders, developing a secret vocabulary that renamed military armaments and equipment using rough equivalents in Navajo.
Airplanes became birds, ships became fish and weapons were named after common things. The word ''bomb,'' for example, was replaced by the Navajo word for ''egg.''
Billison joined the Marines after high school in 1943. He said he was sent to test as a code talker when he completed boot camp and the Marines realized he was fluent in Navajo and English.
The code talkers were not allowed to discuss their work when they returned home after the war.
The Defense Department first released information on the code talkers in 1968.
Billison was a longtime president of the Code Talker Association, and also served on the Navajo Nation Council. 

Hobo Language War Chalking, War Driving WiFi Hot Spots

Creator Bjarne Stroustrup
The Invention of C++ Programming Language
January 1, 1998, gave an interview to the IEEE's 'Computer' magazine. The editors assumed he would be giving a retrospective view of seven years of object-oriented design, using the language he created. By the end of the interview, the interviewer got more than he had bargained for and, subsequently, the editor decided to suppress its contents, 'for the good of the industry' but, as with many of these things, there was a leak. Here is a complete transcript of what was said, unedited, and unrehearsed, so it isn't as neat as planned interviews.

Date: Thu, 18 Dec 1997 08:02:35 +0000
From: "Mrs. Gail Watson"
Subject: Re: programming in the early years

This is an interesting string. At my school, the teachers are very interested in the students using whatever medium is available for the kids to begin learning "programming" skills. I put that in quotes because the exact definition is in doubt.

We teach html coding, logo and basic (yes, the latter two are ancient). The reason we do is simple: students must learn a syntax, apply the syntax, evaluate the output against what was intended or required, and then apply the ever popular "de-bugging" process to clear up errors in their syntax.

What you call it the above exercise (programming, etc) is not important. Actually I tell the children they are learning the same process that computer programmers go through. I think that is a fair statement. That way there is some connection with today's world.

A minority of students who really got in to it.

The mental exercise and the logical thinking is what's good for the kids. Obviously it's great if the latest and greatest tools can be used, but anything available will do the trick. We don't have a classroom full of computers that can support html, but we do have a lab that supports logo and basic. I recommend schools use whatever tools are available to get the kids thinking in a logical mode.

 

gail

-----

Mrs. Gail Watson
Computer Technologist
Pattie Elementary School
16125 Dumfries Rd.
Dumfries, Virginia, 22026 USA

+++++++++++++

Date: Fri, 19 Dec 1997 06:37:47 +0000
From: "Gary E. Karcz" <Gary.Karcz@NAU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Programming in the Early Years

This has been a quality discussion on the merits of teaching students tagging (HTML) and programming skills. We expect students to generalize the strategies developed within programming environments.

Most kids love to do any type of "programming" (I'm at a loss for a word that would be generally accepted), as long as it produces a picture they can print out and take home or put up on the web for parents to see! I tried math programming in basic last year, and discovered that only 1 or 2 kids in each class liked it. I thought kids would be excited to bring in their math homework, write a basic program to do it for them, print it out and turn it in. (The teachers all said they would accept it.) It was universally hated except for a small

But do they?

As of a few years ago, the results of studies focusing on the pedagogy of teaching students to program (HTML not included) are that the "jury's out" on the issue of skills-generalization -- these results indicating that problem-solving strategies are "domain specific." This means that while students are sharpening their programming skills, we may or may not see any direct benefit in other areas.

If anyone knows of current research on this topic, I would truly

appreciate an update!

--Gary

Gary E. Karcz -+- Gary.Karcz@nau.edu -+- http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~gek/

©1997 Educational CyberPlayGround, Inc.™ All rights reserved world wide.