Ave Sophos Sophie Wrobel

Shapecatcher, Undergraduate Computer Science Courses from Stanford, jquip

How much do you know about the history of the English language? This funny and informative video should help you to gain a better understanding of why English grammer is as horrible and inconsistent as it is!

Shapecatcher

Shapecatcher offers an online unicode recognition system. But unlike most recognition systems, it accepts hand-written input on a web canvas - meaning, even if you see a unicode symbol in a picture, you'll still be able to decode what it is. I can't wait for this to work with chinese characters as well - that would mean online handwriting recognition and allow looking up words that you really have no idea how to enter on the keyboard!

Undergraduate Computer Science Courses from Stanford

Stanford has expanded it's free online course catalog - making course material and lectures available to the general public. While it won't give you a university degree, these courses may be interesting for the motivated learner or professional looking for a refresher!

jquip

jQuery is one of those much-loved JavaScript frameworks that is commonly used on websites - but could it get smaller? jquip provides a condensed version of jQuery, allowing you to cherry-pick some of the most useful goodies without all of the rest of the framework hanging along. If you don't heavily use jQuery and want to optimize your site, this may be worth considering.

Offline user patterns that should go online

(Crosspost from Google+)

This is a response to a question from Jason Mayes: "I love combining psychology with design. Goes a long way. Out of interest Sophie, what patterns do you feel really should be available online but as of yet have not been created?"

I'm no psychologist, but here's the first three things that come to mind on what we could enable online to bring current offline-only behaviours online:

1) Groups & Identity Management: This is one that Google+ users are rather annoyed at and has enough discussion on it already. I obviously have multiple groups that I am in, and each of them has a different impression of me: my dance friends don't really care about my job, and my android friends don't really care about dancing. I need a way to intuitively maintain separate personas (either completely public or partially public) and be able to share and discuss within those personas without spamming people in the other persona with stuff they don't care about. These identities need to also be cross-platform: People don't have a Facebook persona and Google persona, they have a business persona and a dance persona and (whatever else your interests might be).

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Changes at Google, Backup Goo, spin.js

Harvest time is almost over - and with the change of weather, some accompanying changes in technology. And a little goodie that I can't help sharing - The Lost Generation, the second place winner in the “u @ 50″ contest by  AARP.

Changes at Google

Google is shutting down several products, including Google Buzz, Google Code Search, and Google Labs. They are also subject to a privacy audit every two years for the next twenty years - a measure that the FTC is putting in place to send a warning signal to the tech industry that user privacy matters. [Read more of my commentary]

Backup Goo

Jan Kulke: "... but the cloud would be too risky without a proper local backup." Do you sometimes share those fears? Or just like the idea of having your own data on your hard drive instead of only in the hands of online services? Backup Goo provides a solution for this - at least, for your Google account.

spin.js

You've probably seen those waiting logos with a spinning circle, until your content has loaded. But how about a lightweight version - 3.7 KB of Javascript, with no animated GIFs or (even worse) Flash? Take a look at spin.js to see how!

CFD Trading - An Introduction

Contents

• Introduction (Basic investment definitions, where CFDs fit in the large picture)
• Definitions and Theory (What CFDs are and the theory behind them)
• Practice (How CFDs are typically used, and what to expect)

Introduction

In the investment world, there are so-called simple and so-called complex investment instruments. The difference is mostly how much risk is involved in that type of investment. Simple investments include things like stocks or funds. Purchasing a stock is equivalent to purchasing a part of company ownership, which means you have an entitlement to part of the profits earned (a dividend), the decision-making processes of that company, etc. Since the value of the company changes constantly, you have two ways of earning money from this: (1) by selling your ownership at a higher value than that for which you bought it, and (2) by collecting dividends. Funds are a way of allowing another person to decide what to invest in: you give money to your financial institute and they have people who do nothing else other than figure out how to best invest it. In return, they give you a part of the profits  they make.

In addition, there are complex financial instruments. These include certificates, derivatives, commodities, options, probably a bunch of things I don't know about, and CFDs. In general, complex instruments involve greater risk and fewer people understand them enough to invest with them. However, with greater risk comes the potential for greater gains, and employing them wisely could be lucrative.

Definitions and Theory

CDF means "Contract for difference". This is a contract with a market maker such that when the price for a particular stock (or other instrument) changes, you receive the difference multiplied by a so-called leverage factor (Hebel). This is typically a factor between 10 and 20. Of course, you can't do this for nothing: the market maker requires that you provide a percentage of the amount that you could move. This is called the margin. Let's put this into a more concrete example: You set aside a security (margin) of 1 000€ for a particular stock. The market maker then puts aside 10 000€ in a fictional account mapped to the value of that stock. So - if the value of the stock increases by 10%, you'd have 11 000 on that fictional account. But because the stock increased in value, you need to provide additional capital so that the margin meets the correct percentage: you now need 1 100 € as your margin. If there is insufficient capital on your account, either you need to provide additional capital, or you will be forced to sell your stocks. Iif you sold at this point, you would have 2 000 € - or 100% return on investment.

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BarCamp Stuttgart 4

Highlights

Missed out on all the fun? Here's my notes from the sessions I've attended; look forward to reading what I missed out on all the sessions that I couldn't attend, but would have liked to, due to timetabling conflicts!

Day 1 - Saturday October 1, 2011

• Negotiation Strategy - Alexander Talmon
• Apps for Children - Magdalena Böttger
• Do-it-yourself Investments - Barbara Hoisl and Claudia Tomaschek
• Cross-Platform Mobile Development - Alex Salnikov

Day 2 - Sunday, October 2, 2011

Unfortunately, my son was a bit cranky (too little sleep!) and so I could not attend as many sessions as I would have liked to. Instead, I took advantage of the opportunity to network with people hanging around as long as I couldn't join a session.

• CFD Trading: An Introduction - Sophie Wrobel
• AR Drone - Frank Stohl
• Brave New Google-World - Marw Hannecker
• Sponsor WINS

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