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Forget Math to Become a Great Computer Scientist?
Coryoth writes "A new book is trying to claim that computer science is better off without maths. The author claims that early computing pioneers such as Von Neumann and Alan Turing imposed their pure mathematics background on the field, and that this has hobbled computer science ever since. He rejects the idea of algorithms as a good way to think about software. Can you really do computer science well without mathematics? And would you want to?"
A lot of the criticism of this guy seems to be knee-jerk defensiveness. Read his papers on 'NULL Convention Logic' and its applicability to asynchronous circuit design and you will see where he is coming from.
Actually, "Informatics" (which is, as you say, an incorrect term in English) is used in other languages to label "Computer Science". In Dutch it is "Informatica", in German it is "Informatik" and in French is "Informatique" (sorry, I now am at the boundaries of my own language skills). All there translate to "Computer Science".
I have to admit that I prefer the English term, because it says much more than the Dutch, French and German terms. Fact is: "Informatics" is the same thing as "Computer Science".
Go to wikipedia, search for "Computer Science" and see what the languages I mention translate to. (Try "Nederlands", "Français" and "Deutsch" in the left hand column.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Bewcause it doesn't say anything at all like he's claiming it says.
It was garden variety executive directed securities fraud. Not errors created by poor VB scripts in Excel.
VI. MISAPPLICATIONS OF GAAP, WEAK INTERNAL CONTROLS, AND
IMPROPER EARNINGS MANAGEMENT
As noted in previous chapters of this report, the extreme predictability of the financial results reported by Fannie Mae from 1998 through 2003 was an illusion deliberately and systematically created by senior management. This chapter provides specific examples how senior executives exploited the weaknesses of the Enterprise's accounting to accomplish improper earnings management and misapply Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), and how they used a variety of transactions and accounting manipulations to fine-tune the Enterprise's annual earnings results. Those actions aimed to perpetuate management's reputation for achieving smooth and predictable double-digit growth in earnings per share and for keeping Fannie Mae's risk low, while assuring maximum funding of the pool from which senior management would receive bonus payments under the Enterprise's Annual Incentive Plan as well as maximum payments under other, longer-term executive compensation plans.
To provide context for the technical material that follows, the chapter first expands on several issues raised in the previous chapters by elaborating on the concept of improper earnings management and describing the circumstances that demonstrate that Fannie Mae senior management must have been aware of the evolving official concerns about such practices.
Following those discussions, the chapter reviews the improper accounting policies and control weaknesses that created opportunities for inappropriate manipulation of earnings at the Enterprise. The chapter then describes inappropriate accounting undertaken to avoid recording other-than-temporary impairment losses to avoid earnings volatility. The chapter concludes with discussions of several additional techniques used by senior management to fine-tune reported earnings results.
The actions and inactions of Fannie Mae senior management described in this chapter constituted unsafe and unsound practices that involved failures to comply with a number of statutory and other requirements. Several independent authorities, for example, require the Enterprise to verify and submit financial information. The Fannie Mae Charter Act--the statute that created the Enterprise--specifically requires that quarterly and annual reports of financial conditions and operations be prepared in accordance with GAAP.1 The Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992, OFHEO's organic statute, requires Fannie Mae to provide OFHEO with reports on its financial condition and operations.
Similarly, regulations promulgated by OFHEO under that statute require the Enterprise to prepare and submit financial and other disclosures that include supporting financial information and certifications, on matters such as its financial condition, the results of its operations, business developments, and management's expectations.
Moreover, in accordance with applicable safety and soundness authorities, Fannie Mae should have had an effective system of internal controls in place under which:
policies and procedures would be sufficient to assure that the organizational structure of the Enterprise and the assignment of responsibilities within that structure would provide clear accountability;
policies and procedures would be adequate to manage and safeguard assets, and assure compliance with applicable law and regulation;4
policies and procedures would assure reports and documents would be generated that are timely, complete, and sufficient for directors and management to make informed decisions by providing relevant information with an appropriate level of detail; and
policies and procedures for managing changes in risk would be sufficient to permit the prudent management of balance sh
I look forward to reviewing some of this guys code.
Knock yourself out. Whether you agree or disagree with this guy, it's obvious his credentials put him at a level above 95% of the people criticizing him here.
Sorry, it is possible to wrote a worst-case O(n lg n) Quicksort. That's worst-case, not expected-worst-case or average-case. The trick is to use an O(n) selection algorithm to find the median of each subset and partition about that. Partitioning around the median guarantees that the rest of the algorithm stays in O(n lg n) as long as the finding the median can be done in no more than O(n). The reason no one ever implements it that way is that the overhead involved in the O(n) Select makes the average-case performance worse. In contrast, if you use perform a randomized partition, you get an expected-worst-case time of O(n lg n). This means that, while you can still get O(n^2) worst-case time, you can't force it to happen by running it on the same data. In order to get the worst-case to happen, you'd not only have to get unlucky with your input data, you'd also have to get unlucky with the sequence of numbers coming from your random number generator. (In other words, some malicious person can't slow down your algorithm by handing you a worst-case data set.)
The only description of the worst-case O(n lg n) Quicksort I could quickly find for free online is slide 16 of these lecture notes (PPT), but there aren't many details there. More can be found in the chapter on Order Statistics in "Introduction to Algorithms", 2nd. ed., by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein.
I think he's astroturfing for the pro-patents lobby.
One of the reasons you can't patent software in the EU (and probably many other places) is that algorithms are essentially mathematical constructs, and maths is generally regarded as unpatentable.
So maybe one of the big software houses has decided that the next time they go to court over patents, it might be useful to have a scholarly book saying how algorithms are not in fact math based, and should therefore be patentable.
It would also explain the odd references to circuit boards - which are another arguing point in the patent debate. If it has a physical expression, the argument goes, then it can't be maths.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!