Cybercop

On Wednesday, 17th March, we had a visit from Detective Inspector David Reid of the Computer Forensic Department of Lothian and Borders Police.
DI Reid suggested that there was no such thing as computer crime! He argued that there was crime that was committed by using a computer to comit the crime but the computer did not comit the crime! A crime is a crime! If a robber used a car during a robbery does not make it a car crime.

We were told about Hackers and Crackers; e-mail scams and online Fraud; organised crime and abusive/paedophile websites.

Inspector Reid gave us a task to do: A company finds that an internal e-mail contains disturbing, possibly illegal, images ! We were put into two groups, one were the board of directors and the other group was the head of IT. We had to say and explain what action or not we would take.

bouncing balls II

here's another animation that's pretty nice (again, only 30 min to learn how to use the programme). And it's two bouncing balls. and loads of planes. You can see how some CGI animations can easily become somewhat surreal. The shading is nice too.

and if you spent more time on the programme playing around with everything... the timing, speeds, materials, reflections, lights, etc...

and a third one... the incredible bouncing ball !! (to be followed by the incredible bouncing balls once I can sort out the camera angle)

and here's another...
amazing what you can make in 40min never having used the programme before !!

Here's an animation by one student. If they want they can say it's theirs... I forgot to ask whether it's ok to put it up on the blog...

On Thursday some discovered the weird meta balls (or blobs) whilst playing around with the 3D programme Blender.

The class split up into 2 groups today.
One group went to the computer room and started to programme things with a programme called 'Simple'. First we worked on easy commands, later we did codes which were more difficult. After that, we started to play around with the codes. We changed the speed of our UFOs, color and other things.

The other group started of with a logic game. We were told that we had 4 cards. One one card is a A, on one card is a K and on the other two cards are a 2 and a 7. The rule was, that if a vowel is on one side, an even number was on the other. Now we had to check the rule. But we were not allowed to turn all the cards around. So which card should be turned around to check?
We had great difficulty with that, so we did that game with drinks and numbers. Two cards had beer and soda written on them and two cards had the numbers 17 and 25 written on them. The rule was that if there is an alcoholic drink on one side, there has to be a number greater or even than 18 on the other side. We managed to solve this game and after this, we were able to solve the other one as well.
Solution: You have to check the A and the 7 and the beer and the 17.

Then we talked about what intelligence is. We thought that intelligence is, when a person knows alot, is well educated and can remember stuff they learned. You also have to be able to process information and you have to be good at situational intelligence. You also have to be logical. We also decided that self-initiative is a pretty clever thing. Also a common sense and emotional intelligence and creativity.
Then we talked about which of these skills a computer has.