We had some great presentations today! Stephen Chan from LBNL’s KBase team, and Kannan Moudgalya.
KBase
KBase is a project to adapt the IPython notebook to fascilitate collaboration between computational and experimental (bench) biologists. But they want to expand. There is a developer preview at demo.kbase.us, you can sign up!
Spoken Tutorial
Spoken Tutorial is a systematic approach to providing materials like Rails Casts. (Is there something like this in Python? Submit a pull-request!)
Check out these statistics!
This program offers vetted, open, downloadable screencasts in hybrid English/native language instruction. Materials span open office software to Scilab and Python.
FOSSEE
The Indian government has also heavily invested in building out free software infrastructure for reasearch and education.
Approximate rationale: “We take a loan from the World Bank, and burn that money on Matlab®”
So, there is now a pipeline to create Scilab and Python materials for over 500 textbooks in science and engineering. All of these materials are available online.
It’s hard to get students to use FOSS! But one success is when students realize that Turbo C (you read that correctly) is a barrier to pass a class – then they’re willing to switch to gcc on linux.
Akash Tablet
They apparently also make these tablets, which aim to be the cheapest linux computers in the world.