Social Media used for Tracking Tornadoes

Researchers using social media to track tornado debris

Computing and Gun Violence

What a hot topic to discuss!

• Viewpoint Can Computer Professionals and Digital Technology Engineers Help Reduce Gun Violence?  -- from Communications of ACM
• Can 'Smart Gun' Technology Help Prevent Violence? - from NPR's "All Things Considered"

One Laptop Per Child

One Laptop Per Child released an inexpensive laptop, now tablet.

Read BOTH:

• Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves
•  The Failure of One Laptop Per Child  

Note the publication date for each article.


OPTIONAL Background: A story about the original laptop, before its release in 2007

 Discussion about the pros and cons of the technology, the challenges, and solutions.

Facebook's Algorithms

The last article I had was from 2007.  This article is from Nov 2012:
News Feed, EdgeRank and page posts: what’s really going on with Facebook?

To discuss with class

• How are some of the algorithms implemented?
• What are some of the non-technical challenges that Facebook faces?  How do they attempt to balance the solutions to these challenges?

Some articles about electronic voting

• Election hacked, drunken robot elected to school board Experts warn e-voting systems decades away from security

•  Could e-voting machines in Election 2012 be hacked? Yes.

Some Articles about the Olympics

• Tim Berners-Lee in the opening ceremony -- not enough people know who he is
• Big Data and the 2012 Olympics
• Simulations of crowds at the Olympics - discusses some of the modeling considerations
• Cloud computing and the Olympics - not quite what I was looking for--it wasn't ready yet
• How Technology Continues to Change the Olympics

I'm having the students read the first and last articles.

Wikipedia: A Clue for Vice-President Nominations

Looking to Wikipedia for Clues of Romney VP Pick
Wikipedia may provide clues to Romney's VP Selection - more about what happened in 2008

There's not a lot in these articles, but it is interesting.  I'm going to use these articles in conjunction with the discussion of Google's search results for Santorum.