Scientific journals are undergoing rapid evolution as they adapt to the Web and various forms of social media. As reported by Nature (Publish in Wikipedia or perish) and in ReadWriteWeb, the journal RNA Biology is experimenting with a connection to Wikipedia. Articles submitted for publication about new RNA molecules must also include a draft Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. The journal will then peer review the page before publishing it in Wikipedia.

Here are the guidelines from the RNA Biology site:

“To be eligible for publication the Supplementary Material must contain: (1) a link to a Wikipedia article preferably in a User’s space. Upon acceptance this can easily be moved into Wikipedia itself together with a reference to the published article.
…
At least one stub article (essentially an extended abstract) for the paper should be added to either an author’s userspace at Wikipedia (preferred route) or added directly to the main Wikipedia space (be sure to add literature references to avoid speedy deletion). This article will be reviewed alongside the manuscript and may require revision before acceptance. Upon acceptance the former articles can easily be exported to the main Wikipedia space. See below for guidelines on how to do this. Existing articles can be updated in accordance with the latest published results.”

This is definitely an interesting and forward looking idea. Yet, I can not help having the cynical thought that it’s also a great way for the journal to boost it’s page rank.

UMBC will again host the 2008-09 FIRST Lego League Maryland State Championship on January 31, 2009. FIRST Lego League (FLL) an international competition for elementary and middle school students that is run by the FIRST organization with support by Lego. FLL teams use Lego Mindstorms kits to build small autonomous robots built with a limited number of sensors and motors that complete to perform predefined challenge given tasks.

“Guided by adult mentors and their own imaginations, FLL students solve real-world engineering challenges, develop important life skills, and learn to make positive contributions to society. FLL provides students age 9-14 with an opportunity to challenge their math and science skills in an internationally recognized competitive environment. FLL combines a hands-on, interactive robotics program with a sports-like atmosphere. Teams of up to 10 players focus on team building, problem solving, creativity, and analytical thinking to develop a well thought out solution to a problem currently facing the world – the Challenge.”

UMBC’s FLL activities are led by Mechanical Engineering Professor Anne Spence.

Registration is now open for the Global Game Jam at UMBC, January 30-February 1, 2009! The Global Game Jam is a game development contest sponsored by the International Game Developers Association and held simultaneously in 41 sites across the globe. At 5PM local time, each site will be told the parameters of the game they all must produce. Participants pitch ideas, form teams, and get to work producing the best game they can in 48 hours. The Global Game Jam participants do not have to be UMBC students, and the Jam is open to participants of all levels of skill and experience. More information is available on the UMBC GAIM blog.

There’s a very interesting late addition to UMBC’s spring schedule — CMSC 491/691A, a special topics class on parallel programming. Programming multi-core and cell-based processors is likely to be an important skill in the coming years, especially for systems that require high performance such as those involving scientific computing, graphics and interactive games.

The class will meet Tu/Thr from 7:00pm to 8:15pm in the “Game Lab” in ECS 005A and will be taught by research professors John Dorband and Shujia Zhou. Both are very experienced in high-performance and parallel programming. Professor Dorband helped to design and build the first Beowulf cluster computer in the mid 1990s when he worked at the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Shujia Zhou has worked at Northrop Grumman and NASA/Goddard on a wide range of projects using high-performance and parallel computing for climate modeling and simulation.

CMSC 491/691a Special Topics in Computer Science:
Introduction to parallel computing emphasizing the
use of the IBM Cell B.E.

3 credits. Grade Method: REG/P-F/AUD Course meets in
ENG 005A. Prerequisites: CMSC 345 and CMSC 313 or
permission of instructor.

[7735/7736] 0101 TuTh 7:00pm- 8:15pm

Stack Overflow has a popular question asking Whats your favorite programmer cartoon?. Nearly 150 have been submitted to date, commented on and sorted by community votes. You’ll recognize a lot of these — XKCD and Dilbert dominate — but I saw many I’d never seen before.

Here’s how Stack Overflow describes itself.

“Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site that’s free. … We don’t run Stack Overflow. You do. Stack Overflow is collaboratively built and maintained by your fellow programmers. Once the system learns to trust you, you’ll be able to edit anything, much like Wikipedia. With your help, we can build good answers to every imaginable programming question together. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home — better programming is our goal. Stack Overflow is as frictionless and painless to use as we could make it. We believe finding the right answer to your programming questions should be as easy as falling into the pit of success. And maybe even a little fun along the way.”

It’s a bit overwhelming, but it’s fun to check in on the questions that are most popular, like the cartoon question. You can follow questions about your own narrow interest by subscribing to the RSS feed for appropriate tags (e.g., python, AI, or Semantic Web.). You can also search for questions based on a set of key words, like those mentioning games and AI

What programming language skills are most in demand? Which languages are hot and which ones are in decline? Is COBOL on the endangered language list? Such questions are of interest to all of us in the IT field and maybe especially to students preparing for careers.

The TIOBE Programming Community Index tracks the popularity of popularity of 150 programming languages, from ABC to XSLT, based on the number of hits for a simple query (“ programming”) run against five web search engines. The top ten in their November 2008 index are, in order: Java, C, C++, Basic, PHP, Python, C#, Delphi, Perl and JavaScript.

They also provide trend data since 2001 for the top twenty languages (e.g., Logo) and an composite overview of the top ten. Finally, they provide some aggregate information by paradigm and type regimen as well as some analysis and observations.

“There are number of interesting changes this month. First of all Perl is at an all-time low, whereas Delphi is still on the rise. Delphi is competing for TIOBE’s “Language of the Year 2008 Award” together with C++ and Python. Another interesting trend concerns visual programming languages. These languages are becoming really popular. Most of them have an educational nature for new programmers. Logo, certainly the oldest visual programming language, enters the top 20 this month. The new StarLogo TNG implementation from MIT is probably one of the major causes of this success. Alice, developed by Carnegie Mellon, is new at position 34, whereas Lego Mindstorms’ programming language NXT-G is at position 37. In the tables below some long term trends are listed about categories of languages. The object-oriented paradigm is at an all time high with 57.9%. The popularity of dynamically typed languages seems to be stabilizing (see trend diagram below).”

This is a good resource, although their methodology only measures some aspects of language popularity and seems to include variations due to changes in the underlying search engines on which they rely. In the past when I have taught our undergraduate programming languages course, I used to estimate the demand for language-specific programming skills by running a set of queries against monster.com. For students, knowing the current demand for skills is obviously of special interest.

Just in time for Christmas, Amazon has released a new service via an iPhone app that let’s you snap a photo of an object you desire and sometime later in the day find out how you can buy one like it on Amazon.

Here’s how the NYT Bits blog described it in Amazon.com Invades the Apple App Store:

“There is, however, one unusual and noteworthy aspect of the app called Amazon Remembers, which Amazon is calling “experimental.” The tool lets users take a photograph of any product they see in the real world. The photos are then uploaded to Amazon and turned over to the far-flung freelance workers in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program, who will try to match them with products for sale on Amazon.com. The results will not be instantaneous (between 5 minutes and 24 hours, the company says), but the idea is to entice consumers to buy products from Amazon instead of its offline rivals.”

Too bad we are in a recession depression.

In this week’s ebiquity meeting (10:30am 12/2, ITE 325), Kishor Datar will talk about his research on “Reverse engineering of RBAC policies using ILP”. Here’s the abstract.

Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is a predominant model used for advanced access control. A variety of IT vendors have provided RBAC implementations in their systems. RBAC provides great flexibility and breadth of application. System administrators can control access at a level of abstraction that is natural to the way that enterprises typically conduct business. These features of RBAC make it suitable for deployment over a variety of web applications like social networks, academic suits etc.

As use of RBAC on the web is increasing, it becomes important for an attacker to know the details of RBAC policies like role hierarchy, constraints in place to effectively attack the system. The question is: can we infer the RBAC details given the access attempts by users of the system?

In Inductive Logic Programming (ILP), background knowledge and negative and positive examples are specified in a logic language. The ILP system generates a hypothesis in logic language that best represents the given set of examples and background knowledge.

If access attempts by the users of RBAC system are stated as facts, and with some background knowledge about the organization’s structure, ILP systems should be able to tell the underlying RBAC characteristics of the system. In this talk I will introduce a possible approach towards identifying RBAC policies using ILP systems like Progol.

Just like Freddy Kreuger, botnets are hard to kill.

In a series of posts on his Security Fix blog, Brian Krebs provides a good explanation of how the Srizbi botnet was able to come back to life after being killed (we thought!) earlier this month.

“The botnet Srizbi was knocked offline Nov. 11 along with Web-hosting firm McColo, which Internet security experts say hosted machines that controlled the flow of 75 percent of the world’s spam. One security firm, FireEye, thought it had found a way to prevent the botnet from coming back online by registering domain names it thought Srizbi was likely to target. But when that approach became too costly for the firm, they had to abandon their efforts.”

In a example of good distributed programming design, the botnet had a backup plan if its control servers were taken down.

“The malware contained a mathematical algorithm that generates a random but unique Web site domain name that the bots would be instructed to check for new instructions and software updates from its authors. Shortly after McColo was taken offline, researchers at FireEye said they deciphered the instructions that told computers infected with Srizbi which domains to seek out. FireEye researchers thought this presented a unique opportunity: If they could figure out what those rescue domains would be going forward, anyone could register or otherwise set aside those domains to prevent the Srizbi authors from regaining control over their massive herd of infected machines.”

Unfortunately, FireEye did not have the resources to carry out its plan and was forced to abandon it, but not before seeking help from other companies and organizations with deeper pockets.

“A week ago, FireEye researcher Lanstein said they were looking for someone else to register the domain names that the Srizbi bots might try to contact to revive themselves. He said they approached other companies such as VeriSign Inc. and Microsoft Corp. After FireEye abandoned its efforts, some other members of the computer security community said they reached out for help from the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, a partnership between the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector to combat cypersecurity threats.

File this one under opportunity, lost.

Quoted without comment or speculation, from the Linux on the iPhone blog.

“I’m pleased to announce that the Linux 2.6 kernel has been ported to Apple’s iPhone platform, with support for the first and second generation iPhones as well as the first generation iPod touch. This is a rough first draft of the port, and many drivers are still missing, but it’s enough that a real alternative operating system is running on the iPhone.”

Discover magazine has named Jon Kleinberg as one of the 20 Best Brains Under 40 for his work on HITS and social networks.

“In the mid-1990s a Web search for, say, “DISCOVER magazine” meant wading through thousands of results presented in a very imperfect order. Then, in 1996, 24-year-old Jon Kleinberg developed an algorithm that revolutionized Web search. That is why today, that same search lists this magazine’s home page first. Kleinberg, now 37, created the Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search algorithm, which estimates a Web page’s value in both authority (quality of content and endorsement by other pages) and hub (whether it links to good pages).

Kleinberg continues to combine computer science, data analysis, and sociological research to help create better tools that link social networking sites. He envisions an increase in how we can see information move through space over time, in what he calls geographic hot spots on the Web, based on the interests of a particular region.

Our social network links and friendships depend on these geographic hot spots, Kleinberg says, which makes searching easier by “taking into account not just who and when, but where.” He is now studying how word-of-mouth phenomena like fads and rumors flow through groups of people, hoping to apply this knowledge to processes such as political mobilization.”

Here are some results of practical research from which many of us can immediately benefit.

Robin Goldstein et al., Do more expensive wines taste better? Evidence from a large sample of blind tastings, American Association of Wine Economists, Working Papers, April 2008, http://purl.umn.edu/37328

Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less. For individuals with wine training, however, we find indications of a positive relationship between price and enjoyment. Our results are robust to the inclusion of individual fixed effects, and are not driven by outliers: when omitting the top and bottom deciles of the price distribution, our qualitative results are strengthened, and the statistical significance is improved further. Our results indicate that both the prices of wines and wine recommendations by experts may be poor guides for non-expert wine consumers.

Jonah Lehrer compares this to an earlier Stanford study. One possible takeaway point: avoid wine training, it will only diminish your ability to enjoy wine. Another possible lesson to be learned: maybe going into engineering wasn’t such a great idea, after all. (spotted on daily dish)