Character Pronunciation

Pronunciation Guide

One of the pronunciations for . (PERIOD or dot) is 'put' from Victor Borge's Phonetic Pronunciation. Now we have to pronounce all these odd characters whenever we explain what to type to help someone on the phone or when we read out some code in a lecture or tutorial. Finding this guide reminded me that different people pronounce these characters differently - I love all the different names for # especially pig-pen!

Week 4

I presented a lecture showing the development of a simple calculator using PHP for server programming. slides. Several versions of the application are developed with increasing complexity, finishing with a version that can be invoked by an SMS message.

An index page for the calculator. I will add links to the code itself.


This application raises the question of where the calculation should be performed - on the server or on the client. Add your views on this issue as comments please.

I also handed a further lecture on web application architecture( slides )
which you should read through please.

ITMB Lecture 24th October 1N5 16.45 - 18.00

"10 easy steps to turn a good idea into a global technology business"

A lecture by Paul Callaghan who founded www.leighton.com

Student-led Seminar

Student-led Seminars will take place next week (27th October) from 3.00 to 5.00 . Deliverables will be:

• Entries in you blog
• A short handout on tehe subject (perhaps selected blog entries)
• A 10 minute presentation followed by questions form staff and students

The data projector and podium computer are available for use.

"The Website Manager's Handbook"

This a book recently written by Shane Diffily from Dublin. It covers a lot of the syllabus for this module, especially that concerned with the setup, maintenance and management of a website.

This book is self-published and printed on-demand by Lulu (www.lulu.com) in Spain for European orders. [an interesting web application in itself.] I would like to propose adopting this book as a module text. I plan to order and pay for a class set to reduced the postage cost. I need your agreement to purchase a copy. The price will be about £16. Print quality is not brillant but for a 400 page book covering a large part of this module's syllabus, I think its good value.

Errors in binary classification

"There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true." - Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55)

Any classification procedure may make mistakes. In a binary classification, two kinds of errors may be distinguished. These have different terms in different disciplines but the underlyig concept is the same;

• In Statistics : Type 1 /Type 2 errors or alpha and beta errors
• In Testing: false positive, false negative
• In Information Retrieval : Recall and Precision

In all cases the problem is to develop a test, procedure or search which will distinguish between cases where a proposition or hypothesis is true or false:

	True	False
Positive	True Positive (TP)	False Positive -Type 1 Error (FP)
Negative	False Negative : Type 2 error (FN)	True Negative (TN)

Examples of such propositions might be:

• The person has malaria
• The email is spam
• The word is spelt correctly
• The article is relevant
• The accused is guilty
  
• The traveller is a terrorist - FIA watchlist
  
• The student is of honours quality

Various measures are used to define the quality of the procedure:

• Efficiency = (FP + FN) / (TP + FP + TN + FN) = FP + FN/ All
  
• Precision = TP/ (TP + FP) = TP / Positives
• Recall = TP / (TP + FN) = TP / True

These two errors are usually in conflict - we can improve the procedure to decease the risk of False Negatives but that will probably increase the number of False Positives. For example, in screening procedures for terrorists, the aim would be to reduce the number of false negative - (terrorists getting in) but that will create many false positives (innocent travellers picked out as terrorists).

The costs of these two types of errors will be seen differently by different stakeholders in a system, leading to inherent conflict in systems design.

•

Week 3

• Review of progress on the research topics
• Creating an RSS reader
• The Flickr API
• Google Spreadsheets as a further example of collaboration

Guru Lecture on Information Architecture

On Tuesday 10th Oct from 16:45 to 18:00 in 1N5 there will be a special lecture from an IBM Information Architect. This lecture will of particular relevance to you so please make every effort to attend.

http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/exist/event.xql?parent=ITMB%20GURU%20Lecture&id=1

Later:

In fact Toby was an IT Architect - a systems engineer of old - I'll post links to the slides on FOLD

Mapping the Web Application territory

We discussed a few possible dimensions to use in researching the territory of web applications.

• by application function - the main function of the site e.g. blog, wiki, news aggregator, auction, search engine, sales ...
• by application architecture - the way the work of the application is divided between client and server - desktop (like GoogleEarth), local server based , hosted application (user-data hosted on central server), RIA (browser providing desktop-like behaviour), ....
• by implementation tools used - for scripting -Javascript, PHP, Ruby, J2EE ... - for persistance - RDBMS, flat files, XML
• by the recurrent problems which most applications must solve - reusing the best solutions - e.g. authentication, access control, data transformation, security, navigability, findability, scaleability ....

Skills in using a search engine

Developing search skills - skill in formulating an efficient query - one which makes fewer false positives (retrieving irrelevant links) and fewer false negatives (missing relevant links)

see Errors in Discrimination

• use the boolean operators - and or - ( for not)
• use ~ for synonyms
• use quote to search for a whole phrase
• use all your languages (if only!)
• dont forget about cached pages when pages not found
• advanced search - e.g for file types
• define: to search for term definitions

Resources

• WikiBook on Search

Research tools

We discussed a few of the research tools which would be useful for your individual research topic - some are obvious, a few less so:

• Encyclopedia
• wikipedia - nearly always a useful starting point
• Howstuffworks - often good explanations of technology, spoilt by advertising
  
• Search engine
• google - you may have other prefered search engines but this is still the best for me
• Search peer-reviewed papers on the web
• scholar google
• MSN
  
• Online academic journals are searchable and available via the library - see in particular:
• the ACM Digital Library
• IEEE Xplore
• Springer Link
• Online industry journals
• Digital Web Magazine
  
• Usage statistics from alaxa - alaxaradar is a useful mashup of alexa data showing trends
• podcasts and vod casts
• Google Techtalks
  
• IT Conversations
  
• comparison sites - there is often a site which gathers technical data on the available software of a given kind - e.g. wikimatrix for wikis
• developer sites
  
• XML.com
  
• IBM developerworks
• Developer.com
  
• Conferences - commercial - XTech, ...
  
• your own personal experience of use
• site discussion boards and blogs
• standards documents
  

Web Applications

This week I would like to explore the issue of the different kinds of internet applications. Some key terms are

• web application
  
• web-hosted application
• Rich Internet Application
• mashup

These describe the architecture of the application which is independant of the application function (to provide a wiki, a blog, an e-commerce site...)

Here is one best-of listing from 2005.

Just to start you thinking, here is a Flickr-GoogleEarth mashup which I built using XQuery. This not the best platform to choose but its fast to develop and good for prototyping at least. Try my Flickr account: 57414735@N00 . There are many ways this mashup could be improved.

Resource links

From time to time both Mark and I discover web resources which we think will be useful. Rather than editing a blog entry each time, we will use the social bookmarking site del.icio.us.

Mark's link is http://del.icio.us/curlygreen/UFIEP6-20-3

Mine is http://del.icio.us/perdika/iad

Quiz answers

I've annotated the quiz we looked at on Friday with some answers and pointers. Please read through this - I spotted a couple of mistakes when I went through it. In some cases the code is has been turned into working examples.

Quiz answers.

Individual Reading Review Blogs

• Alex RSS feed


• Daniel RSS feed


• Darius RSS feed


• Denis RSS feed
  


• Malik RSS feed


• Nigel RSS feed

Terms used in the class on Friday 30th September 2006

Here are some of the terms we discussed in the class on Friday - follow the links to Wikipedia to learn more. Some basic terms - everyone needs to know these:

• Java
• Javascript
• PHP
• Web application
• Web page
• HTML
• Relational database
• SQL
• URL

Then here are some more advanced terms for people who already know the easy ones above:

• MIME type
• XML
• XHTML
• XSLT
• XQuery
• URI
• Web service
• RDF
• REST

There are entries for a lot of these terms in French as well.

Mark.

Learning Java - free resources on the web

Here are some good resources to start to learn Java:

• The Java Tutorials (provided by Sun)
• Free version of Thinking In Java, 3rd Edition, by Bruce Eckel
• Richard Baldwin's Java tutorials

Mark.