Martin Gardner

“It never occurred to me that math could be fun until the day in grade school that my father gave me a book of 19th-century puzzles assembled by Mr. Gardner (…)”
“(…)«Martin has turned thousands of children into mathematicians, and thousands of mathematicians into children. »”

““I don’t think I ever wrote a column that required calculus,” he says. “The big secret of my success as a columnist was that I didn’t know much about math.
I had to struggle to get everything clear before I wrote a column, so that meant I could write it in a way that people could understand.» ”

in “For Decades, Puzzling People With Mathematics”

Plano Inclinado de 2009/11/29 – Ensino Básico e Secundário

“Mário Crespo, Henrique Medina Carreira e Nuno Crato convidam a Professora Maria do Carmo Vieira para uma conversa sobre a Educação em Portugal”

in SIC online – Plano Inclinado de 2009/11/29 – Ensino Básico e Secundário

Microsoft’s top developers prefer old-school coding methods

“Panel of Microsoft distinguished engineers offers views on the state of programming”
in “Microsoft’s top developers prefer old-school coding methods”

The dark side of the internet

“In the ‘deep web’, Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography”.
in “The dark side of the internet“

NASA Images

“NASA Images was created through a partnership between NASA and the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library based in San Francisco, to bring public access to NASA’s image, video, and audio collections in a single, searchable resource.

The site contains everything from classic photos to educational programming and HD video, and is growing all the time as we continue to gain both new and archived media from all of NASA’s centers.

Through the development of nasaimages.org we hope to promote education and facilitate scholarship in the math and sciences at all levels, and to build general interest and excitement around space exploration, aeronautics, and astronomy.

For news and updates, visit the NASA Images blog. ”

in http://www.nasaimages.org/

White House Pushes Science and Math Education

“The campaign, called Educate to Innovate, will focus mainly on activities outside the classroom. For example, Discovery Communications has promised to use two hours of the afternoon schedule on its Science Channel cable network for commercial-free programming geared toward middle school students.”
in “White House Pushes Science and Math Education“

Plano Inclinado de 2009-11-09

Plano inclinado 2009-11-09. Programa da SIC Notícias, moderado por Mário Crespo, com Medina Carreira, Nuno Crato e João Duque.

The Go Programming Language

http://golang.org/

“Google has invented a new programming language designed to reduce the complexity of coding without compromising the performance of applications.

Called Go, the language has been tested internally at Google but is still at an experimental stage, so the company is releasing it Tuesday as open-source code in the hope that it will get help with its future development.

“We developed Go because we had become a bit frustrated with how difficult software development has become in the last 10 years or so,” said Rob Pike, principal software engineer at Google.”

in “Google creates programming language to simplify app dev“

Carl Sagan’s Last Interview

“Not long before he died in 1996, Carl Sagan was interviewed by Charlie Rose and discussed the troubled state of scientific knowledge in America, and how it threatens our democracy. Before Richard Dawkins came along, Sagan was already out there, making the case for scientific thinking, arguing that it let us make progress and keeps our republic vital.”

in “Carl Sagan’s Last Interview“

Amir Pnueli, Distinguished Computer Scientist and Researcher, Dies

“Amir Pnueli, a professor of Computer Science at New York University, died suddenly on November 2 of a brain hemorrhage. Pnueli is internationally recognized as a pioneer in the area of verification, the process of formally proving that systems, such as computer hardware and software, behave as intended by their designers.

Pnueli received ACM’s A. M. Turing Award in 1996 for introducing temporal logic, a formal technique for specifying and reasoning about the behavior of systems over time, to computer science. In particular, the citation lauded his landmark 1977 paper, “The Temporal Logic of Programs,” as a milestone in the area of reasoning about the dynamic behavior of systems.”

in “Amir Pnueli, Distinguished Computer Scientist and Researcher, Dies“