In Praise of Instability

In the current referendum, the Yes side’s posters tell us that by agreeing to this new European treaty we are ensuring stability. “Stability” is seen as an obviously “good thing”.

But is it? I would suggest that human society will not only always suffer intense periods of instability, but that such a bout of instability can actually be a good (and in fact unavoidable) thing.

Stability means the survival of the status quo. It means that real reform need not be undertaken. It ensures that the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. But what if the status quo is not fit for purpose, what if our ruling class is so abjectly corrupt and incapable of self-reform that it really must be displaced by some kind of major upheaval.

In the higher education system that we are all so familiar with, the response to the current crises has largely been “business as usual”. Maybe this shows commendable sang-froid in the face of a crisis. Maybe it’s the band playing on with a stiff upper lip as the ship sinks. Demanding higher and higher fees to sustain a high-cost educational model in the context of an increasingly impoverished population seems unsustainable to me. Which is something that everyone will admit to, but no-one will act on.

Europe has certainly undergone some major bouts of instability in the past century, and indeed the whole point of the EU was to prevent such terrible events ever occurring again. But if the idea was perpetual stability, then it’s clearly misguided, in fact delusional.

But I would hope that we do have the capacity and wit to manage instability to an extent, to ease the pressure on the tectonic plates moving beneath us before we have a major disaster. Vigorous root and branch reform of all of our institutions is the only way forward.

Certainly thinking we can vote our way to a future of endless stability, is just plain foolish.

The Strategic Myth

(or why tactics matters and strategy is largely a waste of time)

Take Napoleon for example. A brilliant tactical mind, able to adapt quickly to changing circumstances, an intuitive opportunist if there ever was one. However for famous people its never enough to just have a good tactical instinct, they want to be seen as having had a grand overall vision – a strategy – all along. So they wouldn’t argue if their sycophantic supporters retrospectively fitted a strategy to a run of tactical successes. But Napoleon fully understood his own genius and its limitations. Famously when asked for what he wanted in a general, he didn’t blather on about them having grand strategic visions – he merely wanted them to be “lucky”. Which interprets as wanting them to be the kind of general that makes their own luck by making shrewd tactical judgments in difficult circumstances.

So my thesis is that there is really no such thing as a strategy. Clever people are making it up as they go along and if it succeeds, then after the event they will maintain that they had a strategy all along.

Take DCU (where I used to work!). Every 5 years of so we would go through the process of developing a strategic plan (and you would think that the Soviet experience of 5-year plans would have been enough to kill off this kind of thinking, but in fact the Universities are the last bastion of Stalinism). Nothing reads as irrelevant as a 5 year old strategy document. When strategies fail, as of course most often they will, they are simply forgotten and pushed under the carpet, and not talked about any more. DCU Centres of Excellence anyone? In fact most staff realise instinctively that strategic plans are just a waste of time, and don’t even bother to read them. It’s like a good bus service, if you miss this one it doesn’t really matter as there will be another one along shortly. But it’s the waste of time and energy that goes into this whole line of thinking that is so objectionable.

Irish Governments are classic slaves to the strategic myth. They are constantly developing plans, commissioning reports - and then shelving them. Which does of course give the impression of having a plan. In fact they are rather cluelessly thrashing around, trying to identify some other country’s strategy to slavishly follow, and missing any number of tactical opportunities in the process. Strategic thinking is a refuge for the intellectually limited. It’s also a great cover for can-kicking and the avoidance of decision making.

In the modern fast-moving world, strategy is even more irrelevant. The whole basis of the proposed strategy is likely to change overnight, rendering the strategy irrelevant, often before the ink is dry on it.

And go on, admit it – what we really admire is the good tactician, the person who can “take the ball on the hop” and do something innovative and clever with it. The person who sees an opportunity, rips up the strategy document, and just goes for it.

Moving an Eircom Pole

Sometimes when you get planning permission in Ireland for an extension to a house there is a requirement to move a utility pool (typically an ESB or Eircom Pole). Either to make way for the new extension or as a condition of the planning permission.

Now the cost of moving the pole falls to the house owner. So how much does it cost? This seems to be shrouded in mystery, and all queries get the response "it depends".

In our case the planning permission conditions required the movement of two poles, one ESB one Eircom. Double trouble. The Eircom pole had nothing to do with the extension, it is far away from the house out on the road. Nevertheless its movement was part of the planning permission, for valid road safety reasons. In other words moving it anyway was a good idea, and this was the planners opportunity to get it moved at our expense by making its movement a condition of the planning permission.

(BTW Cavan County council demand €8K up front for themselves, and also insisted on a completely unnecessary upgrade to our perfectly functioning septic tank. Overall it turns out we would need to stump up about €20K before we paid anything towards the extension itself).

Anyway, getting back to the Eircom pole. The total movement was by 2 metres, We ourselves are not served from this particular pole.

I emailed Eircom and asked for a ballpark figure. They ignored that and told me that first I would have to pay up-front €340.50 for a survey. The cost of the survey would be deducted from the overall cost if we decided to go ahead. Some googling around indicated that the cost would be expensive, with prices fluctuating wildly. On the assumption that only an aggrieved minority post their experiences on the Internet, I guessed it would come in at around €2K.

So I paid my €340.50, and waited. A couple of months later this arrived.

So now you know. The attached invoice indicated that the Labour cost came to an astonishing €3162.50. Note the bit where it says that the final cost may increase (to God Knows What) and that we may have to pay more.

I guess if I wait long enough a passing truck will eventually demolish the damn pole. There have been a few near misses already.



DIY University Rankings - Take 2

Time for an update on the Scott I-Index of Universities/Major ITs in Ireland, as originally described here

http://begrudger.blogspot.com/2012/01/diy-university-ranking.html

1. UCD – 58 (+1)
2. DCU – 56 (-1)
3. TCD – 55 (+1)
4. UCG – 52 (-1)
5. UCC – 36 (+1)
6. QUB – 34 (-1)
7. Maynooth  – 21
8. Limerick – 19 (+2)
9. DIT – 18 (-1)
10. Ulster– 14 (-1)
11. Waterford IT – 14

Change in position in brackets. Not much movement really. Getting a bit bunched at the top, but Euro-for taxpayer Euro, DCU still the best. Even with me gone!

Of PINs and Passwords

When it comes to securing things that are important to us, sometimes we are asked to provide a Password and sometimes a PIN. The latter are clearly to be preferred, as they are only 4 digits long and easy to remember. Most of us re-use the one PIN for everything. I don’t know about you, but I have two different ones I use in different contexts.

Passwords are a curse. On the Internet we seem to need more and more of them, and not only that, there is now an insistence that a password should have a minimal length of 8 characters and some of the characters should be Capitals and some should be numerals. Again I have no idea what others do, but I have three passwords I recycle in various forms. If one of them was previously “mongoose” I now would use “Mong00se” to get past the security fascists. But of course such passwords are much harder to remember.

A common solution is to download a free “Safe” onto your computer and store all of your passwords in that, with the Safe itself protected by a single hyper-secure password. For example, see

http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/

But of course this is literally putting all of your eggs in one basket. Another nice idea is OpenID. See http://openid.net/. Here the one set of credentials (for example your Gmail or Facebook login) get you into a multitude of sites.

But why does a PIN work in one context, but a password is required in another? It depends on the kind of problem you are trying to set an attacker who is out to get you.

Now a PIN or a password has a certain amount of “entropy”, or unguessability. A PIN has exactly 4 decimal digits worth of unguessibility.  In the worst case it would take an attacker 10,000 guesses to find your PIN. A password on the other hand would be expected to have at least 16 decimal digits worth of unguessability, so it should  take an attacker up to 10,000,000,000,000,000 guesses to crack it. These attacks are sometimes called brute force, or dictionary attacks. The attacker simply works though a list of all possible PINs or all possible passwords. The counter-measure is to make the dictionary simply too big to be attacked in this way. For a PIN it is, roughly speaking, sufficient that a dictionary attack should be hard for a human. For a password, a dictionary attack should be impossible even for a fast computer.

Which you need, PIN or password, depends on the context in which it is used, and how much it costs to make a guess. In short a PIN is used in a context where it is only exposed to “on-line “attacks, and a password is needed if it should be exposed to an “off-line” attack. A PIN can typically be used in the context where an attacker is forced to go on-line to some entity outside of his/her control in order to test a guess.  And that entity can make it costly to make a guess, and can punish a wrong guess. The classic example would be if an attacker were to steal your ATM card. If they don’t know the PIN the only way to test a guess is by trying the card in an ATM machine. And after a few wrong guesses the attacker will be rumbled, and no further guesses allowed. So in practise it would be difficult to even make 100 guesses, never mind 10,000.

But if you are storing data in the cloud, it needs to be encrypted. And encrypted data is only really safe if it is protected by a key created from a suitably “high entropy” password.  An attacker who gains access to the encrypted data (which must be assumed to be possible– otherwise why is it encrypted?) can, at their leisure, program a computer to try a multitude of guesses for the key at computer speeds and leave that program running overnight. Now a computer can attempt one hell of a lot of guesses in 24 hours! Hence the need to hide our needle in a haystack of at least 10,000,000,000,000,000 needles.

The problem here is that computers are getting faster and faster, and can search bigger and bigger dictionaries. And search algorithms can be perfectly parallelized, so 100 computers can complete the search 100 times faster. Which explains the recent insistence on more and more elaborate, and hence less and less easily memorisable, passwords. And the elephant in the room is the fact that 10,000,000,000,000,000 is actually not nearly enough, it really should be 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 which is reckoned to be the bare minimum for reasonable levels of security against a sophisticated and powerful attacker with massive parallel computing resources at his/her disposal. And to make matters worse the patterns that appear in memorisable text can be exploited to reduce this search space still further. So unless you are using a password like iUy78t^&aB1@ you really can’t be feeling 100% secure.

Conclusion: Wherever possible a PIN is obviously preferred to a password. Systems should clearly be designed so that an attacker must always be forced to go on-line to test a guess.

On a serious note, I would suggest that the whole Internet/Cloud Computing project is at risk until and unless this problem can be solved!

Stupid Old Pencils

As Bertie Ahern famously described our manual method of voting in Ireland.

It turned out our manual method was far superior to a proposed e-voting system. This came to mind again last week as I saw students in some pain from the effort of three hours of non-stop handwriting. Clearly exam time is the only time that prolonged handwriting is required anymore.

e-voting and e-learning would, at first glance, appear to have little in common.

At first glance both appear to be “easy” activities to revolutionise using technology. Computers can count (extremely quickly and accurately), hence e-voting should be simple - no need for hundreds of people manually counting votes. Modern methods of communications mean that the very best educational material can be widely disseminated with ease via the internet - no need for the classroom!

And that's what they have in common - in fact they are not easy problems to solve at all! On the face of it technology should be very relevant to these processes but in fact its very frustrating to get it to work effectively. E-voting involves all sorts of subtleties around security, and preventing things like vote buying, and coercion, not to mention the integrity of the poll and trust in the result. With e-learning the problems are mostly around accreditation. In both cases it proves very hard to come up an alternative to our “stupid old pencils” for voting, and old fashioned in-class lecturing and the handwritten exam for measuring learning.

Consider for a moment the problem of setting and marking an exam over the internet. It doesn't take long to see what the problems are. How do you prevent collusion and cheating? How do you know who is actually doing the exam? How can you prevent candidates communicating?

Getting the worlds best teachers to record lectures which anyone can access is the easy part! But the economies of scale which should therefore arise are pretty pointless if each student still needs to be individually tutored, assessed and examined.

We still vote by making a mark on a piece of paper. We still mark exam papers by red-penning hand-written scripts. Both activities are in fact stubbornly resistant to technology.

So are we to conclude that there are activities for which technology in just naturally inappropriate?
No. These problems are probably not insuperable. Cryptographers have already come up with very cunning techniques to support e-voting, even internet voting. For example see
http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/568

Perhaps in time some-one with come up with a high-tech solution for e-learning/e-accreditation. But we are not there yet.

DIY University Ranking

Rank your own!

Worried about the methodology (and agenda) of existing university ranking organisations?

Consider this institutional citation count. Note that a variant of this proposed measure is also used, and heavily weighted, by those other ranking organisations. Indeed it is probably the biggest, and least subjective component in the mix. It is based on the number of citations to research papers written by staff members.

Its easy – go to this Web page
http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&view_op=search_authors&mauthors

(I know you get an error message) and input the name of a university in the box at the top and click on “Search Authors”. Then, starting from the top count down (1,2,3..n) through the staff until your count n is greater than the citation count for the next staff member. Lets call this the institutional or i-index. For example type “Dublin Institute of Technology” without the quotes, click on Search Authors, count down through the list, not forgetting to click Next to move to the next page. You get a score of 13. Not bad! (Note all these counts were observed on January 10^th, and are liable to change in the meantime)

Now let’s try and calibrate the method using some world famous universities. In major ranking exercises Harvard and Stanford often comes out ranked number 1 or 2, and Oxford typically 4 or 5. According to the proposed method Harvard scores 233, Stanford scores 159 and Oxford 126. Looks about right.

For Irish Universities (and some prominent ITs) the ranking is (drum roll please!)

1. DCU – 40
2. UCD – 38
3. UCG – 34
4. TCD – 26
5. QUB – 26
6. UCC – 22
7. Maynooth – 15
8. DIT – 13
9. Ulster– 11
10. Limerick- 11
11. Waterford IT – 5

Not quite what you expected? Well you can hardly complain that Google’s algorithms have an axe to grind when it comes to Irish Universities…

Lots of interesting observations can be made. Obviously DCU comes out on top – so no surprise there . Drilling down a little deeper, and from a purely parochial point of view, observe that Computing is still far and away the dominant research school within DCU.

Colleagues from other universities (and departments!) might complain that their staff have not “signed up” with Google Scholar. My response is – if you choose to hide your light under a bushel, who is to blame? You or the bushel?

But of course I accept that as more academics sign up with Google Scholar, the more accurate the measure will become. I have observed that academic applicants for jobs now often attach their Google Scholar citation profile, so its use is rapidly becoming more widespread. Certainly if I am to interview an academic for a research post, it’s the first place I look, and I know that internationally colleagues are doing the same.

Lets fall in Love

Everyone is doing it (with apologies to Cole Porter)

Irish kids are doing it..

http://coderdojo.com/

Regular guys are doing it..

http://codeyear.com/

Girls are doing it…

http://girldevelopit.com/

The Mayor of New York is doing it...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16440126

They are all coding! Also known as Computer Programming.

It would be great to be able to say that Irish Schools were doing it (by and large they aren’t ). But the pressure for coding to become part of the secondary curriculum is building up all over the developed world, and hopefully we will not be too far behind.

Of course I am old enough to have seen all this before. For me coding is still a hobby that I love.

The early 80’s was the era of the coding hobbyist magazine, with titles like Personal Computer World (PCW), Practical Computing (UK) and Dr. Dobbs Journal (US). PCW closed in 2009 having long morphed into a rather dull trade magazine, Practical Computing closed in the 1990’s, and even Dr. Dobbs disappeared as a print magazine, but lingered on as a Website. However interestingly in March last year Dr. Dobbs commenced a resurrected PDF version of the magazine. In fact it would seem like the perfect time for some entrepreneurial type to launch a new hobbyist magazine to ride the current wave of popularity.

In the 80’s inexpensive home computers first became available, and since they didn’t do much of anything unless you programmed them yourself, learning to program was an absolute requirement. I still recall my pleasure in having an article accepted for publication in Practical Computing, featuring a program to solve alphametic puzzles.

Then in the late 1990s personal computers became things you played games on rather than programmed yourself, and the hobbyist scene died away. But now its back with a vengeance, and our discipline will certainly benefit from the renewed surge in interest. Exposure to coding at a young age brings huge benefits to all.

So maybe its time to fall in love with coding all over again.

And the bottom line is - coding is a skill that gets you a well paid job.

Evolving Higher Education

Without variation, there can be no evolution. Darwin may not have actually said that, but he might have.

Consider the seven Universities in the Republic of Ireland. There are all notionally “independent”, and all fiercely protective of that status. And yet they don’t act independently. I like to use the analogy of the chain-gang to describe the way in which they all shuffle together in the same direction, converging on the imagined promised land of “best practise”. Sometimes one of them will make a minor adjustment, which the others will rather reluctantly follow after a short delay. For example Trinity recently decided that all lecturers are in future are to be called Professors. This is by no means a radical move, as they are merely converging on the American norm. However expect the other Irish Universities to follow suit within a year or two.

It didn’t have to be that way. One just might have expected all of the Universities to act individually, to have all assumed radically different approaches to the challenges of higher education, to have leveraged their independence to the maximum. But they haven’t. Ask anyone what is the main distinguishing feature of each of our Universities in terms of how they approach the challenges of higher education, and nothing immediately springs to mind (of more substance than an advertising jingle). With talk of increased collaboration and even mergers, we can expect that trend to continue and to accelerate.

But what if the position we are converging on in ever smaller steps is not optimal, in fact far from optimal? I would suggest that a group of intelligent people with little exposure to our current educational systems, locked away in a room for a month or two, might, just might, come up with a radically improved model for Irish higher education. They might then be funded to establish an experimental third level institution. To avoid the trap of instant convergence to imagined norms, it might be best not to call it a University, but something else, say for example a “National Institute for Higher Education” (!)

Of course in the early 80s when NIHE (Dublin and Limerick) were first established we did just that – and our radical approach was a wake-up call to the Irish third level sector. Maybe we need to do that again.

Fees & Entitlement

Overheard on the radio this morning, a protesting student “We gotta have free fees so we can get a degree and we can get out of Ireland, get a job, and have a life”.

Hmm. Do I really want to make personal sacrifices (pay higher taxes, take pay cuts..) to help that guy “have a life”? Honest answer – No.

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask rather what you can do for your country”, as President Kennedy once said a long time ago in another galaxy far far away..

The problem of fees is a tricky one. I honestly believe that Universities could take a “no frills” approach to cheaper education, and that perhaps this is the way of the future. See for example
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/oct/17/coventry-university-college-half-price-degree
Maybe Michael O’Leary can step up to the challenge? University education costs a lot because the modern university provides so much more than just an education. Perhaps we just can’t afford that anymore.

However I want to teach the best students, not just dumb rich ones (and the occasional bright rich one). So fees must not become a bar to participation in higher education for our cleverest young people, otherwise we all lose out.

Perhaps it would help if we had a Minister of Education who was not so compromised by foolish promises made before the last election. It would be good to have some-one in place with a clear vision and no baggage, who could simply do what was best for the country without having to come up with some elaborate fudge to cover his own political blushes.

Feckless Rankers

Oh dear, the Irish Universities are slipping down the University Rankings again, our own included. On the face of it the most recent Times Higher Education (THE) rankings tell a sorry story.

A University's position in the rankings is, I would suggest, directly proportional to the size of its budget. Rich Universities do well, poor ones do badly. When Ireland had lots of money our Universities rose up the rankings, when the money ran out we slipped back down. So does the money follow the ranking, or does the ranking follow the money? I suggest the latter. In other words money buys you up the rankings, its as simple as that.

I remember replying to an academic blog, written when we were at the peak of our ranking achievement, that the real test of our performance would be our ability to maintain that level when the money ran out. Well as the money ran out our corresponding drop in the rankings was almost instantaneous.

So what benefit is it to a poor country to pour money into Universities? Have the rankings not just become a rather pointless end in itself, a kind of higher-educational rich-list?

Here is a sobering fact. Most software companies are finding it extremely difficult to find good numerate software engineering graduates. The highly ranked Universities of the West are simply not capable of producing them in sufficient numbers. Big multi-nationals and small start-ups alike are heading over to Bulgaria and Romania to find and recruit people with the talents that they need. I was talking to the CEO of a UK-based start-up recently who was just back from Sofia Bulgaria, where he had employed 5 people and set up an office. Microsoft's research centre in Dublin recruits heavily from the same part of the world.

Now the Universities of Eastern Europe are hardly known for troubling the University rankings. Not one in the top 300 in the recent THE ranking....

BYOB

In London in the seventies it was common to see BYOB emblazoned on restaurant windows...

Took me a while to figure out what it meant, as restaurants were then well outside of my budget. It means Bring Your Own Bottle, the idea being that you purchased your own cheap bottle of wine in a supermarket and bought it to the restaurant, which opened it for you (and charged a small “corkage” fee for doing so). Nice to see that the idea is now coming back again into vogue here in Dublin.

In lots of businesses and universities a new mnemonic is also on the rise – BYOD – Bring Your Own Device. The idea being that the employee/student can bring their own preferred computing device to work or college and expect to have it supported by the business/university networks and applications.

There was a time when the business/university IT department would have been horrified by the idea. Indeed IT departments would often mandate a particular make of “supported” hardware, and insist on the use of an out-of-date, but “supported”, operating system. Often a deal would be done with a particular manufacturer to supply the approved equipment at a nice price.

But why shouldn’t the employee/student make their own choice as regards their own individual preference for a particular device? After all they feel comfortable with it, it suits them, why change? Rather than the individual conforming to the restrictions imposed by the IT department, surely the IT department should move to support the individual?

Now there are good and valid reasons for IT departments to be concerned, primarily about security. However gradually they are adapting to the idea, in part because users are voting with their feet. In our labs, filled with identikit PCs fixed to the desks, it is common to see a student stubbornly insisting on using their own personal laptop wedged between the PCs. Project work is often developed and demonstrated on a personal device rather than the standard PC provided.

However with freedom comes responsibility. So the most important advice is, yes, by all means BYOD, but also BYOB (Bring Your Own Brain!)

The Cost of Education

Actually it can be quite cheap.

A couple of years ago I took a summer sabbatical in Malawi, in Africa. A very poor country, where everything has to be done on the cheap. I recall watching a class of maybe 100 toddlers, sitting on the ground in the shade of a Baobab tree, listening to a teacher standing on a box. I guess that’s the same way it was done hundreds of years ago. As the sun moved, children on the edge of the group quietly moved around the other side to stay in the shade. One thing that was there in abundance was an eagerness to learn.

I then visited a secondary school where they did have buildings, but only a few broken down desks. Again mostly the students sat on the floor. The blackboard was so worn only a small corner of it was still usable. I recall a conversation with an Australian accountant who was responsible for checking the expenditure of €150,000 Euro worth of Irish Government aid. I remember him reeling off the list of what that money bought – three new fully fitted school buildings, eight teacher’s houses, 20 outdoor toilets, 100s of desks – the list went on and on. We are not used to that kind of value-for-money here at home, but in terms of life-changing potential that money went a very long way. Here in Ireland €150,000 wouldn’t even make a decent banker’s bonus.

Anyway, I digress. My point is that here in the first world we actually don’t do teaching much differently. Teaching a subject like mathematics still comes down to a teacher standing in front of, and talking to, a classroom full of students. We have all sorts of technical aids, but in fact they are rarely used. I still use chalk and a blackboard, as do most of my colleagues. At the end of the course I set an exam, I collect hand-written scripts, and I mark them with a red pen. Could I do the same under a Baobab tree, or in a class where the students sat on the floor and the blackboard was only partially usable? Well yes I probably could just about manage.

So why don’t we use advanced technology more in our teaching? And if we don’t, why is education so expensive here?

One problem with technology is that you can’t always trust it to work. Chalk and a blackboard always works. Connecting a laptop to an overhead projector never seems to be straightforward. Why is that? Once I recall going to give a lecture in DCU, and looking up to where the projector was, only to see a hole in the roof where the projector should have been. It had been stolen the night before. Sometimes technology actually takes us on a major step backwards. PowerPoint. I rest my case.

So all we have done is to take the ancient teacher-in-front-of-a-class model and surround it with layers of bureaucracy and some ill-fitting technology which arguably doesn’t add much value to the process. Perhaps if we were to strip it back to the basics and then carefully build it back up again we might end up with a much better value-for-money education system. And the way things are going, maybe that’s exactly what we will have to do.

The Tech-Sounding Math-Free Degree!

Surely the solution to all our problems! Maths is completely broken at 2^nd level, we are not in a position to fix it, so go with the flow and extract all math content from our 3^rd and 4^th level courses!

This would result in more students eager to do such a course (its easy!), no problems with retention (no-one fails!), and lots of graduates who will get jobs with companies starved of technical know-how. And while we are at it if its an ICT course take out the programming and software development skills as well, as they are hard to teach and hard to learn.

All of our quality monitors would be quite happy with this, in fact such a course would pass completely under the quality radar. The statistics on completion rates etc. would look great, and no-one would complain. Certainly not the graduates who would think they were the bees knees and expect to quickly get to well-paid top management positions where their lack of technical skills would not be an issue.

(Occasionally I do get such a graduate coming to me with top honours in such a degree and enquiring about doing a Ph.D. It is difficult to explain to them that they have been sold a pup in terms of their 3rd level education, and that there is no way in the world that they would be able for a computing Ph.D.)

And of course the problem wouldn't be solved, just pushed up the food chain. It’s the aghast employer who learns to their horror that the honours science graduate can’t do long division.

Meanwhile big multi-nationals, while going along with the myth of our world class education system, grumble amongst themselves, quietly import people from abroad to do the hard technical stuff, and plan their departure from our shores.

To avoid such dumbing down (for that is what it is) we urgently need to fix math at 2^nd level. Here is where “Project Maths” comes in, which seems to have gone from being a blatant political fig-leaf (politicians must of course be seen to be “doing something”), to being the fount of all our hopes. Frankly the jury is out on Project Math. I have heard good and bad reports. Let us hope it lives up to its billing, as there is a lot riding on it.

Meanwhile in DCU we will continue to insist that graduates emerging from our computing degree courses will have strong technical skills. This is why employers consistently indicate a preference for our graduates. If this means taking the occasional hit from an ill-informed media about poor retention rates, then so be it.

The Media & Mathematics

How often do you hear a media professional say something like “Sure I was brutal at Mathematics at school – hated it with a vengeance - hahaha..”,

the subtext being – look it clearly didn’t do me any harm as here I am on RTE getting a fat fee for jabbering on about nothing in particular and displaying how witty I am. I suppose its only natural that people from a humanities background dominate in the media – after all they need to do something. And these put-downs of the sciences must be taken on the chin – any attempt at retaliation along the lines of “sure you are only a useless bunch of needy navel-gazing wasters” brings on an instant whinge about the humanities not being sufficiently valued. And these people surely need to feel valued.

The other day I heard an hilarious exchange on RTE radio when it was suggested that some-one might actually have been good at maths, and might indeed even have liked the subject. The poor man was indignant as he hastily protested that no, he was brutal at maths, absolutely hated it. He was clearly horrified that he might be considered as being outside of the national consensus. And that consensus is about fear and loathing of math. The damage done by this sort of idle chatter is inestimable. You certainly would not get away with boasting of illiteracy (hahaha, can’t read or write, aren’t I the gas man?), and yet boasting about innumeracy is completely acceptable. And this shows up in numerous ways – billions and millions routinely mixed up and a complete inability to absorb the significance of statistics (and indeed as many politicians would be aware, it is trivially easy to fool the Irish public by misuse of statistics). In fact it would not be too much of a stretch to suggest that national innumeracy might have played a part in the mess that is our current financial/economic situation.

And yet as is now generally accepted, producing graduates with world class maths skills is vital to our national well-being. Bluntly put, multi-nationals are not attracted to set up in Ireland because of the theatre scene. Instead we produce commentators whose job is to commentate on other commentators. It’s a national characteristic – we much admire clever commentary on the activities of others, rather than actually attempt something ourselves. This is of course recognised by specifically Irish terms such as “begrudgery”, or “hurlers on the ditch”. Unfortunately it encourages a strongly anti-innovation culture.

It is often claimed that Ireland has a great tradition in Mathematics. However a close examination of the role of honour reveals that most of Ireland’s famous mathematicians were of a distinctly Anglo flavour, and although they may have worked here (as part of the then UK), they could not be considered as representative of a long native tradition.

Which isn’t to say that such a tradition cannot be started right now…

Don't Dun an Doras

Today I got an email from an academic publisher…

They were telling me the good news that I could submit a paper for publication in their journal, and that the cost to DCU (if my paper were accepted) had been reduced to 18 Euro per page. If anyone wanted to read my paper they would have to either subscribe to the journal at the cost of 240 Euro per year (for 4 issues), or pay a hefty price to download the paper from the publishers web site.

I shook my head in amazement. Are there still people out there that do that? In the field of Computing we have long moved over to Open Access publishing. For example all of my academic papers are available for download for free from the Web, and none of them cost me a penny to put them there.

In fact its you, the Irish and European taxpayer, that is paying for most of this research in the first place, so surely its only right that you should have free access to view its outputs.

Here in DCU, and in particular in the School of Computing, we have pushed this ideal to the limit. All of our Ph.D. theses are published on our own open-access repository called DORAS – see http://doras.dcu.ie/. Many of us choose to place all of our published output (conference papers, book chapters, journal publications) there as well.

My colleague Prof. Alan Smeaton informs me that

"DORAS has been in operation for almost 3 years and there are now 578 research publications from the School of Computing available online http://doras.dcu.ie/view/groups/groups2a.html, more than any other School, Faculty or research centre in the University. These have had 34,490 individual downloads of the full PDF of the publications, with the most-downloaded paper being:

Coogan, Thomas and Awad, George M. and Han, Junwei and Sutherland, Alistair (2006) Real time hand gesture recognition including hand segmentation and tracking. In: ISVC 2006 - 2nd International Symposium on Visual Computing, 6-8 November 2006, Lake Tahoe, NV, USA. http://doras.dcu.ie/259/

which has had 1,081 individual downloads."

In a new initiative we have decided to make available presentations by all of our Ph.D. students, where in a recorded video of an academic talk they describe their research and their progress to date. These recordings are normally made after the students have completed about 2 years of their research program, and they then appear on this website in a blog posting. So now as well as browsing the printed word, you can also hear our research being presented directly “from the horses mouth”.

Open Access is the future of the dissemination of academic research.

(Of course there are occasions when we might have to keep quiet for a while about what we have discovered – there may after all be valuable Intellectual Property that we would need to take action to protect first.)

Very Reduced Instruction Set

Just how small can a computer instruction set get? 32 instructions? 16?

Well in fact you can get away with just one instruction, subleq, or Subtract if Less Than or Equal To

subleq a,b,c

where the contents of address a are subtracted from the contents of address b, and if the result is not positive jump to address c.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer

Interesting but not much use you might think. Well consider a computer doing encryption with a secret key. If each different instruction consumes a slightly different amount of power, then by accurately measuring tiny variations in power consumption you might get an idea of which instructions are being executed, and hence you might be able to determine the key. This is a very real problem and such methods are known as side-channel attacks. But if there only is one instruction such attacks are useless.

http://www.iacr.org/workshops/ches/ches2010/presentations/04-Invited_Talk_1/CHES2010-Naccache.pdf

In this talk by David Naccache (who we had over here in DCU giving a talk a few years ago), as you can read here (page 59) some-one has actually built it, and even produced a C compiler for it!

Mathematics? What's that?

We are always getting surveyed about one thing or another, but sometimes you wait in vain for some-one to carry out a particular survey. What I am waiting for is for some-one to ask 1000 Irish people, equipped only with pen, paper, a comfortable table and chair, and 10 minutes of time (no calculator allowed), to divide 1104 by 23 and get the right answer. I bet less than 20% could do it.

Actually I take a fairly apocalyptic view of the state of maths in Ireland today. As a nation I reckon there are maybe only a few thousand people left who really understand math. It is gradually being leached out of our national consciousness. Come back in 100 years time, and left to our own devices, knowledge of maths would be entirely gone. Like ancient Harp making, it will disappear, except for a few old text books that no-one will understand. Already we have people teaching maths who don’t understand the subject, to classes who are not surprisingly completely bewildered by it.

In Western countries like America, where the education system is much more variable in quality, but where the average is really rather poor, they are not much better off. But America being America can always suck in know-how from other countries. So America is full of eager and math-literate Indians and Chinese, who will within a generation, (America being America) become as American as Barack Obama. Can we pull off the same trick and simply import math know-how? I don’t think we can, we are not America, and international maths skills will probably not be attracted in sufficient numbers to our shores. So we need to fix our own maths education system, urgently.

However this is a project that will take a generation to complete, and sadly we haven’t even made a serious start on it yet. After a decade of talking about it we are finally getting bonus points for honours maths - starting next year. Glaciers actually move many miles in 10 years so to describe the speed of change here as glacial would be an insult to glaciers.

Then again most other Western countries have the same problem, so if we can get serious about this, and launch a national effort involving all stake-holders, we could still steal a lead over the competition.

Googling for Code

You need a piece of code to implement a very standard algorithm. You could write it yourself, but instead you Google for it. No need to re-invent the wheel you say to yourself. Then frustration sets in..
My particular need was for a function in C++ to calculate the determinant of a square NxN integer matrix. Ideally I want something non-recursive and which does not need to allocate any memory.

Doesn’t seem like a lot to ask. However the solutions I find are all recursive, some very poorly written, some hundreds of lines long. Many are specific to the trivial 2x2 or 3x3 case. Most allocate a lot of memory from the heap. Now I hate recursion – does my head in - but I had assumed that a recursive algorithm was optional and that a non-recursive alternative always existed. Some websites held out the promise of a solution, but only if I signed up to join some group or other which would probably expose me to requests for payments, annoying ads and a deluge of emails. No thanks.

Anyway my search resulted in failure, so I resorted to writing my own – something which really should not be happening at this stage in the game. It does use recursion, and it allocates a very small amount of memory, but its less than 20 lines long.

int determinant(int n,int *matrix[])
{
     int i,j,k,sign=1,det=0;
     int **minor;
     if (n==1) return matrix[0][0];
     minor=new int* [n-1];
     for (i=0;i<n;i++)
     {
         for (j=k=0;j<n-1;j++)
         {
             if (j==i) k++; // skip i-th row
             minor[j]=&matrix[k++][1];
         }
         det+=sign*matrix[i][0]*determinant(n-1,minor);
         sign=-sign;
     }
     delete [] minor;
     return det;
}

Securing the Cloud

The potential benefits of cloud computing are amazing. Imagine for example your medical records being in the cloud, accessible immediately from anywhere in an emergency...

But wait a minute. What if the cloud is not secure? Already there have been a couple of instances where a cloud was hacked, or where there was a sustained loss of service. The cloud represents a single point of failure, and thus must not be allowed to fail. And what about privacy - you don't want anyone and everyone poking around in your medical records. The solution here is encryption, but a particularly sophisticated type of encryption. For example you might want your medical records to be completely available to you and your surgeon, and partially available to your GP and nurse, and somewhat available to your medical insurer. What's wanted in fact is known as "Attribute-Based Cryptography", where your access to the data depends on who you are and what attributes you have.

Well cometh the hour cometh the solution. As often happens in research, in a completely seperate development from cloud computing, mathematicians have recently come up with the perfect solution to the problem of attribute-based cryptography, based on the mathematics of "pairing-based cryptography". Previous efforts floundered on the problem of "collusion attacks". Say one needs attribute A and attribute B to access certain data. I have attribute A only, you have attribute B only, each of us individually does not have sufficient attributes to access the data, but if the two of us get together... The new methods prevents this. This is a very hot research area.

If you want to read more, see

http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/565

and

http://ece.wpi.edu/~mingli/papers/Li_SecureComm10.pdf

But academics having solved a problem do not linger long on it. There are other problems of interest. Unfortunately commercial exploitation of such ideas is often delayed, as knowledge of these new techniques is not widespread.
Here is another problem of particular interest to an Irish audience - Electronic Voting. We in Ireland dabbled with it before but the proposed method then was totally insecure. Ideally we would like to encrypt each vote and yet still be able to count it. However normally you can't do maths (like counting) on encrypted data. The solution is "homomorphic cryptography". Google for it. We don't quite have a perfect solution for it yet, but we are getting there... Another fascinating and hyperactive research area.