How a Million-Dollar Superwatch Is Fighting Back Against Computing

Cheap or expensive, mechanical timepieces remind human wearers of their own humility.

At its heart, a mechanical watch is a fancy spring. A metal coil stores power when the crown is wound tight. A series of gears harnesses that energy in even increments. It spins a central wheel, whose oscillations are geared to turn the watch’s hands. Once gears spin, it’s possible to add more complications, as watchmakers call them. A date… read more

Computing as a Liberal Art

Thoughts on Education, Research, and Progress

I recently read Paul Lockhart’s incredible essay “A Mathematician’s Lament” [PDF]. Lockhart, a mathematics teacher at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, wrote the piece in 2002, but it wasn’t published until last year, on Keith Devlin’s monthly column. “A Mathematician’s Lament” begins with the nightmares of a musician and a painter, both horrified to see their art forms turned into… read more

Teaching Computing with… Computers?

The NSF Prefers Strings, Crayons

After an unintentional hiatus, last week I resumed following Georgia Tech CS colleague Mark Guzdial’s Amazon blog. His latest salvo is a thought-provoking piece called Using computing to teach computing (Hint: Don’t use the “P” word). The post centers around a question Mark posed to Jeannette Wing, Director of the Computing & Information Science & Engineering branch of the NSF… read more

Alexa Is a Revelation for the Blind

Legally blind since age 18, my father missed out on the first digital revolution.

“Is it ‘Electra?’” my father asks, leaning in close to the Amazon Echo my mother has just installed. Leaning in close is his trademark maneuver: Dad has been legally blind since age 18, the result of a horrible car crash in 1954. He has lived, mostly successfully, with limited vision for the 64 years since. “Call it the right name!”… read more

The Dot-Coms Were Better Than Facebook

Twenty years ago, another high-profile tech executive testified before Congress. It was a more innocent time.

Twenty years and a month ago, Bill Gates, then chairman and CEO of Microsoft, made his first appearance before Congress. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gates defended against the accusation that his company was a monopoly. Antitrust investigations into the company had been ongoing for almost a decade by then, since the George H.W. Bush administration. The ubiquity… read more

A Googler’s Would-Be Manifesto Reveals Tech’s Rotten Core

Office culture is only part of the problem.

An anonymous Google software engineer’s 10-page fulmination against workplace diversity was leaked from internal company communications systems, including an internal version of Google+, the company’s social network, and another service that Gizmodo, which published the full memo, called an “internal meme network.” “I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due… read more

Tenure, a game by Owen Gaede

The example title that opens my book Persuasive Games

In 2007—ten years ago!—I published Persuasive Games, a book about how computer software, and especially games, make arguments. In it, I advanced a theory of “procedural rhetoric,” or argumentation through process and model instead of oration, writing, image, and the other media formats typically associated with rhetoric. The book opens with an anecdote about my session with remarkable game. Remarkable in part because it offered such a… read more

Russian Invasion

A review of Dan Ackerman’s The Tetris Effect

In an official photo from April 6, 1993, Hillary Clinton smirks slightly while playing a Nintendo Game Boy aboard a flight back to Washington, DC. The record doesn’t note what game she was playing, but surely it was Tetris, the cartridge that shipped with the popular Nintendo handheld upon release in 1989. When the photo was released last year, Clinton was already… read more

The Armed Campus in the Anxiety Age

Campus-carry laws add unnecessary worry to communities already overwhelmed by unease.

ATLANTA, Ga.—A while back, a student at Georgia Tech, where I teach, showed me a series of anonymized “threats” that students in a notoriously difficult class of mine had posted in an online discussion forum. I’d just returned grades, and nobody was happy. “Does he have kids?” one asked. “I’m going to steal them and blackmail him,” answered another.” “Had… read more

The Internet of Things You Don’t Really Need

Smart devices turn every industry into the computer industry, and dupe consumers into thinking their lives are better for it in the process.

Atlanta turns yellow for two weeks in April. Streets, driveways, terraces, cars—everything cakes with pollen. It’s the trees that cause the worst of it. Pine, oak, sweet gum, sycamore, mulberry, hackberry, birch, willow. Prolific itching, sneezing, and car-washing ensue. Grilling season officially begins when the pollen subsides. This year’s was particularly grievous, and perhaps that’s why I was so eager… read more

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