We discussed:
- Programming Paradigms
- Six principles of OOP
- Elements of OOP
The slides： Lecture 2: Thinking Object-Oriented (2)
Any comments?
Today, I gave my first lecture for Course CSCI 383 with some general introduction. Here is an overview:
- A bit History of Programming Languages
- What is Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)
- Why is OOP?
- Popularity of OOP
- Language and Computation
Here is the slide file created using google doc presentation:
- Thinking Object-Oriented (1) 2009/09/14
I am glad that some students liked it. There is certainly a lot to improve in making and delivering the lectures. It is my first time to teach this course. If you have any suggestions, let me know. You can leave comments here, or send me emails directly.
Here is a picture of the classroom (NH245) and some of the students:
I am teaching a course at StFX: CSCI-383 Object-Oriented Programming & Design. Tomorrow will be the first class.
Interestingly enough, today (September 10) is the Teachers’ Day in the People’s Republic of China. I did not know how does this day come until now (check wikipedia). But I did know the basic idea. In Chinese culture, teachers are highly-regarded. People are making analogies between teachers and candles: they are both “burning” themselves to “enlighten” others. I remember when I was a child, my parents taught me to respect and listen carefully to the teachers. When I was naughty, my parents might warn me that they would report to the teachers if I did not behave. In that sense, the teachers have more authorities than the parents. This might be a good thing, though there is at least one strong side effect: students rarely challenge or question their teachers. If you put a Chinese and an English student together in one class, you can note the differences. But of course, situations are always changing, so my observation might not hold for the new generation from China.
On September 6th, the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao attended classes in a junior high school, paying tribute to the teachers. At similar time, USA president Barack Obama gave a national speech to the American students. They both know the importance of investing more in the future generation. But easier said than done. Some figures show that the Chinese government is falling behind of world in supporting education: in 1985, it invested 2.3% GDP in education, and the world average is 5.2% (developed country average 5.5%, developing country 4.5%); not until 2004, this figure went to 4%, but was still below the world average in 1985. As a Chinese, I really hope that our government can live up to the promise they made to their people.
It is always easier to blame the government. So tomorrow, I will stop blaming, and start to explore what I can do in education. I am looking forward to that.
Micro-blogging has increasingly been an important tool for communication among people. The web services like Twitter, Facebook, provide certain kinds of micro-blogging. Typically, they allow you to record your current status, such as your thoughts, your feelings, or your discoveries, etc, and share them among your friends or other people.
Human beings, as social animals, are naturally attracted to these services. From my personal experiences, I have always some interesting ideas (at least I thought), but they are usually not great enough to be written into blogs; also due to laziness, I seldom write them on a paper. Even interesting information gets easily lost, let alone those that are not very interesting, such as what I eat in lunch, whether I do sports today, when I go to sleep, etc. But it turns out that these kinds of information might be very valuable from health care perspective, especially if you have certain kind of illness. The doctors and nurses won’t stick to you to check these information so regularly, because it is very time consuming, and they typically have to take care of many people at the same time. In my opinion, the micro-blogging services provide the essential information recording service so that you could use it to improve your health and tackling your illnesses. For example, you could routinely record your health related micro-information so it can help the doctors to find out what are the causes, combined with the traditional medical records & lab tests; and they might even offer you suggestions on what you could do to improve your health based on your information. If the local-community you are in starts to do micro-blogging as well, then you could get social support as well. There are indeed many issues there, such as privacy protection (you might not want your today’s blood pressure known to the public), that can inhibit the acceptance of this new technology, but this just mean that there are still a lot to be done.
I just found some interesting slides by Phil Baumann, who points out the potential applications of Twitter in Health Care. I will write more on this in the coming weeks.
On 5th July 2009, a tragic event happened in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Province, China. As of 9th July, it has been reported that 156 people died, and more than 1000 people injured. I was saddened by the news. So what happened? What are the causes of this tragic? What is still going on? Here is a list of information sources I collected. I will keep updating it until I know enough to answer these questions.
- July 2009 Urumqi riots (Wikipedia)
- Search for Han Chinese sister whose family were butchered by Uighurs (The Times, 10 July)
- Roit Video 1 (*containing very disturbing images, Youtube)
- Photos on 8th July (Boston.com)
- The Urumqi Mass Incident (A compilation of news from many sources. *Containing very disturbing images)
- Migrants Describe Grief From China’s Strife (New York Times)
- The riots in Xinjiang: Is China fraying? (Economist.com)
My joint paper with Wiebe and Mike with title “Verification of Games in the Game Description Language”, has been accepted by the Journal of Logic and Computation. This is my second journal paper.
Here is the preview version (final draft). The first version was submitted on 8th August, 2008.
