Regrade Request

We are still here!  Back from vacation to record an episode!  Road alligators, Roman roads, Kingdom Hearts on billboards, the James Webb Space Telescope, and more!

Gravity vs. light, has Google found sentient AI, UVA software engineers are pretty good according to one testing company, and Joker 2 might be a musical.  

Transcript of Google engineer talking to LaMDA AI - https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917

Programming Note: We will be recording sporadically over the summer... okay, more sporadically than usual... but still.  At least this time we told you :-)

Our long-delayed Graduation Special is here!  We talk about the origin of academic robes and the cool different colors, notable guest speakers at UVA for graduation, and can your degree be revoked.

(And it takes the entire episode for us to realize this is our podcast's one year anniversary!!)

Let's learn a bit about the history of graduation ceremonies at UVA!  

It's exam season, so let's talk about how we come up with "good" assessments for students by examining Bloom's Taxonomy.

What is agile development, can you publish a paper without being at a university, how do live service games work, hidden messages in your money, and geese attacking Will at Notre Dame.

"Let Me Solo Her" is the celebrity of the moment in Elden Ring, a self-driving car gets pulled over in San Francisco, competitive Tetris is a thing, book bannings, and we try to figure out what "web3" is supposed to be.

Sorry for the missed weeks!

Mark finally scored a PS5, so naturally we have to talk about Sony's new subscription service.  Also, the Ukrainian government is selling NFTs to raise money, why the color in VHS tapes fade, and more "no stupid questions"!

Apple's got a new desktop, Elden Ring is a great game, there is a suspicious job posting for a professor position at UCLA, and can werewolves eat chocolate?  Gotta say - there's a little bit for everyone in this episode!

McBurney takes over Office Hours this week and goes super in-depth on what professors actually do in their job.  Surely all we do is just teach three hours a week and spend the rest of the time playing Elden Ring and other video games, right?

Right?

We took our show on the road last week to the SIGCSE Technical Symposium!  Well... kinda.  It was the "SIGCSE Coffee Break" show, sponsored by Google.  (HEY!  We DID get a sponsor!)  We thought we'd share some clips from the show!  If you want to watch the full video versions, you can go to http://sigcsecoffeebreak.org.

Has Wordle gotten harder since it move to the New York Times?  Why is gold valuable?  Why did an AI pay more for a guy's car than he paid for it at the dealership over seven years prior?  How would you change the board game Monopoly?  And why you shouldn't tweet about playing Hearthstone during faculty meetings.

Nintendo has announced they are closing the 3DS and Wii U eShops, which will remove the ability to purchase thousands of titles across the two platforms.  Not to mention the loss of the Virtual Console on both systems!  What is being done to preserve games from previous generations?

We're all over the place this week - from the Winter Olympics to Moderna's vaccine getting an official name to what makes up most of the traffic on the internet.  Come join us!

Today's Syllabus - 1. Modern's new name and Pokemon vs. Medication, 2. Building a new computer, 3. What makes up most of the traffic on the internet, 4. Where do videos go if YouTube dies?, 5. Facebook lost a LOT of money this week!, 6. Curling is awesome.

I know, I know... you've heard all you want to hear about viruses... probably enough to last a lifetime.  But how about computer viruses?  The ILOVEYOU virus hit the internet in May of 2000 and has been rated in the top 10 most impactful computer viruses of all time by the Smithsonian Institute.  Interested in how the virus came to be?

Well, it all starts with a rejected fourth-year thesis proposal from a Computer Science major...

Classes have started back for Will (but not for Mark!) and we are back with some more questions!

Today's Syllabus:

• Speedrunning for 7-year olds
• Blue Light Special (Glasses)
• Why do we sign things?
• What is the right number of people for a board game?
• Shower curtains that attack you!

As Will gets ready for classes to start, Mark gets oddly fascinated by his new Instant Pot and starts to think about all the different types of small computers in everyday devices.  (These are called "embedded systems," by the way!)

We are back after a long winter's nap!  The end of the fall semester took quite a toll and we needed a break, but we're back with a new episode to start off 2022!

Today's Syllabus:

1. Professor Motivational Mantras
2. Is Latin a dead language?
3. Yelling at dumbbells
4. Stable space orbits
5. Phone numbers spoofing

In this post-shopping frenzy episode of Office Hours, we talk about what you are really buying when you buy a piece of software.  What are you allowed to do with it?  Should you feel bad when you click past all those dialog windows when you are installing?  Can you use iTunes to create nuclear weapons?  Find out here!

Helpful information about interesting EULAs courtesy of https://www.makeuseof.com/.

Happy (U.S.) Thanksgiving!  As we come together with friends and family, our thoughts turn to one thing - shopping!  The guys dig into where Cyber Monday came from and how Amazon handles all the traffic.  We also talk about the conservation of energy and thermodynamics, but in a super cool and hip way.

The .5 episodes are now a new segment!  We are calling these individual episodes "Office Hours," where one host goes in-depth in a single topic!

Today, Mark talks about why you might get those "do you want to update" messages from your software and why you should pay attention to them.

We missed a week!  We are so sorry!  Life's tough that way... then the world ends... ?!?!?  Yes, this week we talk about how the world is going to end!  Until Mark has had enough and talks about recycling. 

It's a solo show again this week as it's advising season at UVA and things are really crazy!  But Mark just HAD to talk about the new MacBook Pros and what it means for them to be using the M1 (ARM) CPU!  How is it different than an x86 (Intel) CPU?  Listen and find out!

We're back with a full episode, talking about professors slinging burgers at Michigan State, questions from robots, the right to repair, and can you trust research!

After a tough week, McBurney flies solo to talk about morality in gaming, specifically around some ideas in Mass Effect.  

Extra Credits Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2Tp8JopdIc

Alternate Episode Title: "Ironic Witcher Quotes"

We have our first listener email question!  What is better - passwords with gibberish or passphrases?  We talk about password best practices before a new round of "Excuse Me, What Now?", Will goes into why Microsoft moved on from Times New Roman to Calibri (and we debate how to even say "Calibri"...), before we discuss how Facebook fell off the Internet for a few hours.  Come join us!

Cloudflare's blog post on what they saw during the Facebook outage - https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/

In this episode of Regrade Request, we take a look at the dangers of being a gamer.  While Mark discusses physical injuries that have happened due to playing Nintendo (such as "Nintenditis" and various blunt force traumas from using a Wii remote), Will goes more into emotional issues, such as cyber bullying.

And, of course, a few questions from No Stupid Questions to round out the show!

We go back to the future by talking about the next Y2K - Y2K38!  Yes, there's another one on the horizon!  Also, questions about why you don't find OLED computer monitors, whether you should upgrade to Windows 11, and the current state of bananas.  Oh, and why can't barbers pull teeth anymore?  I mean... that was a thing in the Old West... right?

In a more (hopefully) thought-provoking episode, we examine the aesthetics of gaming, as described in the paper "MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research" by Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek from Northwestern University.  It is also discussed in the wonderful Extra Credits YouTube series: https://youtu.be/uepAJ-rqJKA

We discuss games that have affected us in major ways and what aesthetics lend themselves to those experiences.

Bottom line: 1) games are great and 2) Will and Mark will never agree on Breath of the Wild.

We are back in the swing of things with classes, so we talk about some of our favorite teaching evaluations!  Plus some discussion about VHS vs. Beta was like HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray, some overly-specific questions from Reddit, and more!

We're back to a normal show!  This week, we have our first themed episode: "When Software Goes Wrong!"  We talk about interesting software failures and questions, like why is the "Blue Screen of Death" blue and what happened with the Iowa caucus results reporting in 2020.

Another round of "Excuse me, what now?" as well!

Join us and make sure to review the show on the podcast service of your choice!

We are neck deep in trying to get our classes ready for students next week, so here is the Q&A lecture that we did at the end of the spring 2021 semester that got us thinking about doing a podcast in the first place.

We left some UVA specific things here, because they might be of interest to folks broadly.  For example, when we talk about "GC" and "CR" as grades for our course, those were COVID-specific grades created just for these semesters.  How employers will look at those on transcripts remains to be seen.

We look forward to another school year, considering yet another set of ridiculous student excuses in "Excuse me, what now?"  Then a lot more fun with web bots, QR codes, why four digit PINs are okay, and... wearing plate armor to Parliament?

We've got a new segment this week!  Want to know just how crazy some excuses we get are?  See if you can guess the fake excuses from the real ones in "Excuse me, what now?"!  Also, questions on best designed games, autonomous cars, and how to not interrupt your friends when playing table top games.

It's another mini-episode as summer scheduling turns out to be a pretty tough obstacle to overcome!

Have you ever wondered why your browser cares so much about whether you enjoy cookies or not?  It doesn't even have the good manners to ask what type of cookie!  Let's talk about what browser cookies actually are, whether they are "dangerous," and how they can be used for good... and EVIL...

In this episode of Regrade Request, Will and Mark turn more toward educational questions, explaining what DDOS attacks are, how to algorithmically pair your socks efficiently (we swear - this is more interesting than it sounds), and deliberately trying to sabotage your own Zoom calls.

Oh - and fantasy monster snacking guidance.  That too.

Let us know what you think!  hosts@regraderequest.com / @MarkSherriff / @ProfMcBurney

Or leave a review on iTunes or Google Podcasts!

In the pilot episode of Regrade Request, Will and Mark tackle deep and meaningful questions involving Chuck Norris, video game relationships, and goats.  Does teaching together online translate into podcasting?  Find out!