Didier took a stab at cryptography. He implemented a toy RSA program “that can encrypt and decrypt a whole file”. His Python program is available for download from his blog.

That’s what I call learning. There is a pretty good chance that Didier has a solid grasp of the RSA algorithm now, unlike someone who read about it in textbooks.

Well, that’s pretty much the type of learning I do all day too.

Oh! And that’s eLearning too! Indeed, the fact that computers are readily available and cheap makes it much easier to study algorithms.

Harold has a beautiful post on the fact that technology and new media don’t fit in the classroom:

All of the action is outside the classroom – blogs, wikis, IM, podcasting – you name it. Soon, the only place to get away from media will be inside the classroom. Hey, they don’t even have a telephone (c. 1876) in every classroom yet.

Classrooms used to have books in them. Books were the best learning technology available.Now, the best learning technology is on the Web, but the Web is not in the classroom.

So, when will classrooms be obselete? Or are they already obselete?

Google open sourced some Python functional programming code : Google Goopy.

(Got this through Sean McGrath.)

Update: Marcel Ball who now has a blog and big large scholarship, pointed out to me that http://code.google.com is a better link to give out.

I don’t know how reliable this is, but through Didier, I learned that French is the third language spoken in the US. Here are the numbers:

It seems amazing that Chinese would not greatly outnumber French. Go figure!

Michael Pazzani offers a course on Web Personalization. I have no time to check it further, but it looks like a very interesting course and the slides are available online.

What’s more interesting is that he offers his students a Word version of a 2004 TiVo paper (TiVo is a company that sells a TV show recording device). The paper is also available as a PDF file through ACM (but you need to be a member).

We describe the TiVo television show collaborative recommendation system which has been fielded in over one million TiVo clients for four years. Over this install base, TiVo currently has approximately 100 million ratings by users over approximately 30,000 distinct TV shows and movies. TiVo uses an item-item (show to show) form of collaborative filtering which obviates the need to keep any persistent memory of each user’s viewing preferences at the TiVo server. Taking advantage of TiVo’s client-server architecture has produced a novel collaborative filtering system in which the server does a minimum of work and most work is delegated to the numerous clients. Nevertheless, the server-side processing is also highly scalable and parallelizable. Although we have not performed formal empirical evaluations of its accuracy, internal studies have shown its recommendations to be useful even for multiple user households. TiVo’s architecture also allows for throttling of the server so if more server-side resources become available, more correlations can be computed on the server allowing TiVo to make recommendations for niche audiences.

Now, together with Verizon and Amazon, this is the third large company to use item-item collaborative filtering as in our Slope One algorithm used by inDiscover.net (which we licensed/sold to Bell/MSN). The TiVo paper itself is not so interesting: the details are conveniently hidden away.

Remember my post about the use of mathematical notations and how it was very useful in making papers precise? Well, the TiVo paper hardly use any mathematical notation, so it looks friendly, but try to really understand what they do and how they do it precisely. Maybe I’m just not smart enough, but I can’t really figure out. If they had expressed themselves in clearly stated and detailed equations, it would be clear. Now, all you have to go on is “we used a linear weighted average”. It is enough to understand the big idea, we could approximatively reproduce their work, we could, but we would have to guess our way through.

Maybe I’m just an old geek complaining too much…