Preface: Of the parables and other tales that have informed your style of interpersonal dealings, the way that you manage your relationships, which have had a prominent impact? For many, of course, there are the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dao De Jing and the Analects of Confucius, the Bible or the Qur'an. For interpretation and anecdotal commentary, there are the Talmud, the Mencius, and the Hadith. Better scholars of philosophy than I have produced many ages' worth of analysis, annotation, and metacommentary on these work, though, so rather than attempt another Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership, I'm going to promote another book that conveys some messages about leadership, but that you may not have thought of very much as a good model: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion.

( The Sons of Feanor and the Union of Maedhros )
( Maedhros: humility in strength, coalition leadership, building to last )
( Maglor: mentorship and mercy )
( Celegorm, Caranthir, and Curufin: do-it-yourself, enemies of enemies, and the power of oratory )
( Amrod and Amras: survivor type )
( Final assessment )

This is the first part of a seven-part series.

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Banazir

Here are a few questions for computer science majors:

1. When did you first encounter balanced search trees and heaps for priority queues?
2. Which variations (red-black trees, heaps) did you cover?
3. Did you have you implement it from scratch?
4. If not, what did you do with existing code?
5. How many semesters total did you spend studying balanced search trees (among other topics)?

To be cross-posted to compscibooks

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Banazir

I was looking up things about virus research following a discussion with John Mark Agosta about cybersecurity and uncertain reasoning, and came across this article.

Hsu, W. H. (1992). Generic Virus Detection. MacTech: The Journal of Macintosh Technology (formerly MacTutor: The Macintosh Programming Journal), 8(2).

( Abstract )

Edit, 09:30 CST - ( Note about the paper )
Edit, 10:35 CST - ( Note about cybersecurity and anti-virus measures )

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Banazir

As those of you who have been following the story of my course, CIS 690, Data Mining in Bioinformatics, may recall, I have changed the prerequisite from CIS 300 (Data Structures and Algorithms) to CIS 200 (Introduction to Computer Science).

There are 10 people in the class but only 5 are taking it: 3 CIS undergrads, 1 Ph.D. student in Math, and 1 Ph.D. student in Statistics. That leaves 5 auditors: 1 M.S. student in CIS (and Ph.D. student in Stats), 1 Ph.D. student in CIS, 1 statistics faculty member, and 2 SUROP students (Math and CS).

"How does one cater to such a diverse audience?" I wondered. A couple of them are quite familiar with BLAST and dynamic programming, while the whole concept of string matching algorithms (or algorithms in general) is new to others.

Thus did I come up with the following example for explaining edit distance and k-approximate string matching today:

--u-r- 2-- q--l 4-- mee!1!!
++|+|+ x++ x++| x++ ||-|---    insert (10) / delete (4) / twiddle (3)
you're too cool for me-!---

( History is philosophy teaching by examples )

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Banazir