Thursday, October 26, 2017

COMP7004 Class 07.2



We looked at John Oliver's excellent explanation of the problems associated with credit rating companies and data collection generally.

I asked students to come up with ideas on how these problems might be solved. We discussed how that was pretty much what was done in Europe 30 years ago.


Wednesday, October 25, 2017

SOFT6018 Week 07

We looked at arrays.

We looked at how to do animation and developed a very basic game of Pong.

Monday, October 23, 2017

COMP7004 Class 07.1

We considered some of the issues surrounding advances in digital photography.

Thursday, October 19, 2017

COMP9039 Week 06 - Copyright IV & The Database Right


This week we looked at communication to the public and the issue surround linking to content that is legally placed online



We looked at the ways in which  a database can be protected in Europe.


In the live session there were some questions about contract law. I e-mailed on a transcript of that discussion to students.

COMP7004 Class 06.3




We looked at data protection and discussed some cases from the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.

COMP7004 06.2

We considered at now cybertechnology has aggravated existing privacy concerns.

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

SOFT6018 Week 06

We had an exam. Afterwards I did the solutions on the board.

Students worked on Processing. We didn't do anything new today.

Monday, October 16, 2017

COMP7004 Class 06.1

CIT was closed do to a hurricane

Friday, October 13, 2017

COMP9039 Week 05 Copyright II & III


Copyright - Part II




Copyright - Part III


In the live session we discussed the contract law case studies.

Thursday, October 12, 2017

COMP7004 Class 05.3

We did some group work and discussed why privacy is important. We discussed how certain things are difficult/impossible without it.

COMP7004 Class 05.2

We did some group work and tried to answer the question: what is privacy?

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

SOFT6013 Week 05



We looked at functions and passing parameters.

Code samples are in BB and I e-mailed them to students also.

I asked students to experiment with the code and modify it to understand what is going on.

Monday, October 9, 2017

COMP7004 Class 05.1

I gave students a case study to discuss.  I felt that students weren't taking it seriously and so we finished the class early and had a discussion on what I expected of the students.  I, quite rightly, also found out what students expect from me.

I though it was a very useful discussion.  Hopefully it will make things better going forward.

Thursday, October 5, 2017

COMP9039 Unit 04 (Week 04) Intellectual Property / Copyright


Into to Intellectual Property




Copyright - Part I


Only one student attended the live session. S/he had no questions. So although there is a recording of the first part of the session there is nothing of value in it for students.

I did receive some questions about the assessment by e-mail. I will compose a response to those and e-mail the class.

I will also e-mail and upload some notes in due course.

COMP7004 Class 04.3

We considered how useful codes of ethics really are and discussed the difference between micro-ethics and meta-ethics.

We talk about whistle blowing

COMP7004 Class 04.2

We looked at codes of ethics from the IEEE, ACM, and ICS. We identified which aspects were obligations that might apply to anyone and those that were specific to computer scientists.

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

SOFT6018 Week 04

This week's big idea was loops.

We did some cool things in Processing with loops.

We used Processing's infinite loop and Draw() technique to move the sun in our house pictures. I asked students to figure out how the change the colour of the sky as the sun rises and sets.

Monday, October 2, 2017

COMP7004 Class 04.1

We looked at the structure of a logical argument and discussed the relationship between premises, arguments, and conclusions. We looked at common logical fallacies.

Thursday, September 28, 2017

COMP7004 Class 03.3

We looked at other sources of morality.  We discusses deontology and asked whats would [   ] do?

We discussed moral absolutism and relativism.

We previewed some of the issues will discuss later in the module.

COMP7004 Class 03.2

We looked at the Trolley Problem

We listened to the start of  BCC Documentary on Ethics
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02sd7qk
and discussed the relevance trolley problem in a world where we may be distanced from the consequences of our actions by machines at act as intermediaries.

We discussed the challenges of programming self-driving cars to make ethical decisions.

Students went to moralmachine.mit.edu and took part in the experiments. We discussed some of the issues that arose.