Why do we need to teach children binary coding?

I am very much in favor of teaching children more than one number system (e.g. binary additional to the decimal system). To me this gives children a better understanding of the nature of numbers - I know that this seems not to be widely shared ;-)


Now I found a further reason why it essential to know binary codes - How else would you decode this best before date on this chocolate bar if you would not know it!

What did you do last Weekend: Soldering a radio kit and trying out a Sony Walkman

What did I do with Vivien the last weekends? We soldered a radio receiver kit (retro style) and it worked - there are still plenty of stations on the air all over Europe. Nowadays you have to make quite some effort to find interesting electronic kits - besides the radio we got a candle light simulator (it is an LED controlled by a PIC microcontroller that imitates a realistic flickering candle in the form factor a small candle).

Do you remember the Sony walkman? It was at the time quite a revolution - looking at it now it looks a bit bulky. The BBC4 program "electric dreams" featuring a fast-forward through technologies from the time I was born till now was very entertaining and it brought back a lot of memories … ups getting old :-(

Which one do you like best?

We got samples for USB sticks for the proceedings of the automotive conference - which one do you like best?

USA votes, election party in our lab

There many good reason to have an international team - especilly when doing research in pervasive computing and user interface engineering. This morning I learned another one: you can have election parties (=drinks and food in the lab ;-). 

Predicting elections results goes new ways and it is interesting that the Xbox Live Polls (http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/09/xbox-live-poll.html) were quite close to the result - already quite some time ago. Perhaps this large poll produced just by accident good results - but it may be a first step towards internet elections. Having internet voting on a game console brings new models for voting to one's mind (e.g. only if you have reached a certain level in the game you can vote ;-)

2 day faculty meeting in Essen

The last 2 day we had a meeting - with all faculty of the ICB - discussing the future challenges of work at universities in the context of our current situation. For me the this time was very well spent as I got to know many of my colleagues better and it was incredible to see the potential (from a scientific perspective as well as looking at the people) we have in our organization.

To me it is always amazing how much of a difference it makes to have a professional external moderator running such workshops (and we were very lucky with Klaus Schneider Ott from focus-team). Even though many of the psychological games are well known to many of us - they still work well and move discussion forward and help in creating common ground and even increase trust. He lectured us (after much of the discussion has happened) on basics of communication (e.g. transactional analysis) and again not novel they lead to serious reflection and progress.

PS: Do you know how to continue the row in the image below? What is the next sign? …

If you think of M-Omega-8 you are wrong - but still it is really easy ;-)

Adverts communicate an image?

Arriving in Hamburg airport I was surprised by the advert for a rental car. You get a armored car for only 250€ a day. What does this tell you about Hamburg ;-) I took the bus and went to Lübeck…

Will caching and Redundancy be key?

Skype is down for a few hours and is has an impact on users. It is interesting that for some people I do not have regular phone numbers anymore. This minor (at least to me) inconvenience and the massive reaction in the news shows however how much we start to rely on network centred infrastructure tools.

Thinking about myself: xing and linked have largly replaced my local contacts database and my calendar is online, too; the acm-digital library, springer link, computer.org and google-scholar make me through away papers after I have read them (at the beginning of my PhD-studies I still sorted them in folders); gmail and gmx hold my private mail in the network; I have not bought paper maps for quite some time, and as recently posted access to knowledge is nowadays often via google. The current move of putting applications online – which I really like greatly – speeds up these trends.

With current sizes of hard drive and future network connectivity I think caching and recording becomes key. For many domains this is easy. Everything you have ever seen on the screen will be forever on the computer (easy for static content such as web pages, even for videos this is not far in the future; assuming 365 days x 8 hours x 1Gbyte/hour is about 3TByte/year). In many domains Pre-fetching seems useful. In some areas this seems straightforward. When you view a paper all papers that are cited and papers that cite this paper will be cached locally (and not just short term, but forever ;-), too.

I wonder when we can by the entire index of the web (e.g. google cache) for offline use. Will this every be possible or is content growing faster than storage?

At least I will start caching important information (e.g. mail & contacts) in the future locally.

From a business perspective this is interesting, too. Even if there is a major provider (e.g. Skype) people will create their own redundancies with a further provider (e.g. messenger) - so there will be always room for several players.

Off-Topic: How defend against Cyberwar

During the last weeks there has been a lot of discussion about the vulnerability of infrastructures after the experience in Estonia. One interesting question to me is if a country will need in the future the power for cyber deterrence.

(Given the current discussions on computer security in Germany I have one option: a bot network that includes all computers in a country that are connected in the internet - could be added as an additional function in the planed German Bundestroianer ;-)