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Stanford University has launched a series of 10 free, online computer science (CS) and electrical engineering courses. The courses span an introduction to computer science and an introduction to artificial intelligence and robotics, among other topics.The free courses are being offered “to students and educators around the world” under the auspices of Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE). Each course comprises downloadable video lectures, handouts, assignments, exams, and transcripts.

The courses are nearly identical to what’s offered to enrolled Stanford students, according to the University. However, those taking courses through SEE are not eligible to receive Stanford credit for them.

Course participants do not register, and have no direct contact with Stanford instructors or professors. They do, however, have the ability to communicate online with other SEE students. A detailed SEE FAQ is available at http://see.stanford.edu/see/faq.aspx.

The University says SEE’s initial courses include “one of Stanford’s most popular engineering sequences: the three-course Introduction to Computer Science taken by the majority of Stanford undergraduates, and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering.”

Specifically, SEE’s first 10 courses are…

• Introduction to Computer Science:
  • Programming Methodology — CS106A
  • Programming Abstractions — CS106B
  • Programming Paradigms — CS107
• Artificial Intelligence:
  • Introduction to Robotics — CS223A
  • Natural Language Processing — CS224N
  • Machine Learning — CS229
• Linear Systems and Optimization:
  • The Fourier Transform and its Applications — EE261
  • Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems — EE263
  • Convex Optimization I — EE364A
  • Convex Optimization II — EE364B

Course videos can be viewed using YouTube, iTunes, Vyew, WMV Torrent, and MP4 Torrent. Start at http://see.stanford.edu/

The past 3 weeks has been both eventful and (for me) monotonous. We acquired a new care-giver, and the days had been a blur of training and mad scramble by Rena (my principal care-giver) to keep up with the daily schedule. As you can imagine, a lot of the household  chores were left off, and Gi and the boys have to make do with the minimum. Fortunately Nurul (the newbie) is beginning to take up some slack (and none too soon for Gi is beginning to tired out from doing the chores in her already limited free time), and I get more time on my PC.

During the time while I was passively being used for Nurul’s training and practice in carrying out the routines of caring for me, a procedure for obfuscating easy to remember passwords (and thus also to guess or crack by potential hackers) was ticking over in my head. In whatever time that I have on the PC (and the servers on Antioch), I managed to put down in Perl (one of my favorite programming languages) CGI code what I had in mind. It is my hope that with this, you will use a well remembered phrase or sentence to derive at an equally memorable but longer and more varied (thus stronger) password. So go ahead and give it a whirl. Do post any comment, view, criticism and idea you have on this.

Getting drugs into the eye is a tricky business. The eye is well adapted at keeping foreign objects out, so most drugs are washed out by tears, disappear down the eye’s drainage system, or simply spilled outside the eye. By some estimates, as little as 1% of any drug delivered to the eye actually ends up inside it.

One potential way round this is to use soft contact lenses steeped in a solution of drug that leach it into the eye. However, it is hard to cram a dose large enough to be clinically significant into lenses, which also tend to leak the drugs away too quickly.

So Mark Byrne, a chemical engineer at Auburn University in Alabama, has a developed a contact-lens material that can hold much greater concentrations of drugs and release them more slowly.

The trick is to design the molecular structure of the lens material to mimic tissue-receptor sites that the drug will target within the body. The goal is to make the dummy receptors strike a balance, not holding the drug too tight, but also only releasing it slowly into the eye.

Byrne has set up a company – OcuMedic – to commercialise the idea and is already developing anti-fungal contact lenses for treating eye infections in horses.

Read the full drug-laced contact lenses patent application.

The internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from real science, says the creator of the World Wide Web. Sir Tim Berners-Lee said he was increasingly worried about the way the web has been used to spread disinformation. He was speaking in advance of an announcement about a Foundation he has helped create that will vet websites. It will certify sites that it has found to be trustworthy and a reliable source of information.

On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly. A cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable, a sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging.

Original BBC Report