Computer Science | Grinnell College

This week in CS Table, we’ll be examining the use of technology in the gambling industry to create games that everyone can enjoy (perhaps a little bit too much…)! Modern-day slot machines are a beautiful combination of technology, psychology, and data science that power a $150 billion industry. And more recently, the video game industry is looking towards them to understand how to power experiences that are not “gambling” at first glance, but are heavily inspired by it. We’ll discuss what goes into a modern-day gambling experience as well as its ethics.

1. Brendan I. Koerner. How one man hacked his way into the slot-machine industry. Wired.com. July 15, 2011.
2. Andrew Thompson. Engineerings of addiction: slot machines perfected addictive gambling. Now, tech wants their tricks. Theverge.com.
3. Robert Rath. Why cops are raiding arcades over a fishing game. Vice.com. November 23, 2016.
4. Mike Rose. Chasing the whale: examining the ethics of free-to-play. Gamesutra.com. 2013.
5. Finally, here’s an extra fun “reading” video: an example of a modern day Japanese pachinko machine (warning, NSFW Aussie language).

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-1:00pm in JRC 224B. Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has put together a detailed guide of a number of recommended practices used to maintain privacy and security at https://ssd.eff.org/, which we will rely on for this week's discussion. Please complete the following readings before Tuesday:

1. An Introduction to Threat Modeling. EFF Surveillance Self-Defense Guide.
2. Seven Steps to Digital Security. EFF Surveillance Self-Defense Guide.
3. At least one other overview, topic, or briefing from the SSD guide.

If you have specific practices that you use and would be willing to share, please come prepared to demonstrate or describe them. When you choose additional readings, you are encouraged to look for guides that you think are relevant to your own use of technology.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-1:00pm in JRC 224B. Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

At this CS Table we will run and decipher a collection of interesting one line programs. Short programs can be surprising, mind-bending, elegant, infuriatingly clever, or all of the above. We'll follow a relaxed format, where we will look at a new program, run it on a few examples, then try to figure out how it does what it does.

If you have any programs you would like to contribute, please send them to Prof. Curtsinger via email. All programming languages are welcome. We're happy to bend the definition of "one line" in many cases, but do try to stick to programs that are concise.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-1:00pm in JRC 224B. Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

At this CS Table we will discuss a recent turn of events in the presidential election: election security experts are calling for recounts in several critical states. Why are they doing this, and why do we need to recount or audit our elections?

Read these three recent articles building up to this recent call:

• Bruce Schneider. Election Security. In Schneier on Security. Posted on 11/15/2016.
• Ron Rivest and Phillip Stark. Still time for an election audit: Column. Posted on 11/18/2016.
• J. Alex Halderman. Want to Know if the Election was Hacked? Look at the Ballots. In medium.com. Posted 11/23/2016.

In addition, to give you more background on the perils of voting and technology, read this paper by researchers at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor about breaking into Internet voting systems:

• (PDF) Scott Wolchok, Eric Wustrow, Drawn Isabel, J. Alex Halderman. Attacking the Washington, D.C. Internet Voting System. In Financial Crytography and Data Security. Volume 7397, pp 114–128. Springer-Verlag, 2012.

Printed readings are available at Noyce 3827.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-1:00pm in JRC 224B. Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

This CS Table will focus on two computer science education initiatives: CS Unplugged and code.org. These are interesting new approaches to getting computer science education into high school and grade school with some interesting goals. We'll start with a CS Unplugged exercise before the discussion!

There are three short readings suggested for the discussion on November 22:

• About CS Unplugged
• CS Unplugged Principles
• What do kids really need to know about computer science? New roadmap wins widespread support. Lisa Stiffler, GeekWire.
• Printed readings are available at Noyce 3827.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-1:00pm in JRC 224B. Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

As computation plays a larger role in society, we are beginning to see cases where algorithms encode the biases of the past. While this phenomenon is widespread, there is a particularly interesting case where computer programs make bail recommendations for suspects in criminal cases.

There are two short readings suggested for the discussion on November 15:

• Battling Algorithmic Bias. Keith Kirkbatrick, Communications of the ACM.
• When Algorithms Discriminate. Claire Cain Miller, The New York Times.
• Printed readings are available at Noyce 3827.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-1:00pm in JRC 224B. Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

On November 8 in CS Table, we will discuss the state of JavaScript, the language running inside your browser. This is a programming language that seemingly ignores virtually all of the wisdom garnered in programming language design over the last half century, and yet it has a huge devoted fan base and enormous impact worldwide. We'll talk about some of the amusing quirks in JavaScript, briefly dive into the world in which JavaScript developers must operate, and speculate about why JavaScript has still been so successful. As always, you do not need any experience with JavaScript to participate in this discussion.

Readings:

• First, we have an imaginary dialogue between a new JavaScript user and an experienced developer. How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016. Jose Aguinaga.
• Next, we have an article that should have the title "Ten astonishing things you never knew JavaScript would do to your values". Truth, Equality, and JavaScript. Angus Croll.
• And finally, the always-hilarious James Mickens on the horrors of web development. This was a suggested read last year, so you may have seen it already. To Wash It All Away. James Mickens. USENIX ;login: logout.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-1:00pm in JRC 224B. Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

On Tuesday, November 1, 2016, we'll discuss what echo chambers are, their pros and cons, and how we ought to change our media consumption in light of them. An echo chamber in the context of media studies is a phenomena where the beliefs of a group are reinforced and amplified through repetition entirely within the group. Paradoxically, while the Internet promises to enable free speech and the transmission and sharing of ideas globally, some argue that it has only served to create silos for like-minded people to avoid interaction with dissenting opinion.

Readings: two short articles about echo chambers with respect to Facebook.

• Brian Barrett. Your Facebook Echo Chamber Just Got a Whole Lot Louder. From wired.com. June 26, 2016.
• Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, and Lada Adamic. Exposure to Diverse Information on Facebook. From research.facebook.com. May 7, 2015.

If you are interested in this topic and want to read more, check out these books: Cass Sunstein's Republic.com and Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-1:00pm in JRC 224B. Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

This week in CS table we’ll be exploring the intersection of music and computation along two dimensions:

1. Computational Musicology: the analysis of musical structure from a statistical perspective, i.e., music informatics.
2. Live Coding: the live performance of music using computer programs.

Computational Musicology. Along the first dimension, there are two readings:

• Kris Shaffer. “What is computational musicology?”. 2016.
• Trevor de Clercq and David Temperley. “A corpus analysis of rock harmony”. In Popular Music, Volume 30/1. 2011.

The second reading is fairly dense and pre-supposes some knowledge of basic music theory. If you can get through the "Analysing the harmony” section where the authors describe their analysis technique for music, that would be grand. You may find that this recording of Hey Jude by the Beatles helpful to compare against: The Beatles - Hey Jude. Uploaded by TheBeatlesVEVO on youtube.com.

Live Coding. Along the second dimension, watch this TEDxNewcastle talk by Sonic Pi creator Sam Aaron on live coding: Sam Aaron. "Programming as Performance”. Uploaded by TEDx Talks on youtube.com.

If you are interested, feel free to dive deeper by checking out:

• Aaron’s Sonic Pi programming language, Sonic Pi: The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone.
• And the TOPLAP organization which promotes live coding performances.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-1:00pm in JRC 224B. Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

For the CS Table on September 13, Peter-Michael Osera would like to discuss data collection and privacy in a place we normally don’t consider: higher education. In efforts to streamline operations and better the student experience via data analytics, universities are frequently turning to the cloud for answers. Does this have implications for how we as students and faculty manage our data? Read these two articles:

• Goldie Blumenstyk. "As Big Data Comes to College, Officials Wrestle to Set New Ethical Norms”. In The Chronicle of Higher Education. June 28, 2016. http://www.chronicle.com/article/As-Big-Data-Comes-to-College/236934 (Original link, paywall) http://www.chronicle.com.grinnell.idm.oclc.org/article/As-Big-Data-Comes-to-College/236934 (Stable link through Grinnell’s proxy, free)
• Emin Gün Sirer. "Outsourcing in Higher Ed Considered Harmful”. In Hacking, Distributed. August 29, 2016 http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/08/29/outsourcing-in-higher-ed-considered-harmful/

Printed copies of the readings will be available after noon on Friday at Charlie Curtsinger’s office (Noyce 3827). In addition to the readings, there is a short “homework” activity to get you in the spirit of the discussion. Try to answer these brief questions:

1. What FERPA is and how does it relate to your personal information? Read more about FERPA here: US DOE. "Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)”. http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html
2. Grinnell employs a number of third-party services that handle our (digital) data in various ways. List as many as you can.
3. Why can these third-party services handle sensitive data that would otherwise be protected by FERPA? Look to FERPA FAQ, US DOE. “FERPA Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)”. http://familypolicy.ed.gov/faq-page#t62n218

Completing this homework isn’t required to attend CS Table, but we will start the discussion by tackling these questions. So please come prepared if you have the time!

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-1:00pm in JRC 224B. Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.