Computer Science | Grinnell College

Grinnell College's CS Table is a weekly gathering of folks on campus (students, faculty, staff, alums, etc.) to talk about issues relating to computer science. CS Table meets each Friday at noon in JRC 224A, the Day Public Dining Room (PDR) in the Joe Rosenfeld '25 Center (JRC). All are welcome, although computer science students and faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.

This page provides a record of our activities for Fall 2009.

28 August 2009: What I did this summer

Students and faculty shared their summer adventures and misadventures.

4 September 2009: Why Humanities Students Should Learn to Program

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. (2009). Hello World: Why Humanities Students Should Learn to Program. The Chronicle Review 55 (20), January 23, 2009, pp. B10-B12. Available online at http://chronicle.com/article/Hello-Worlds/5476/.

11 September 2009: Technology and Disability

Shinohara, K. and Tenenberg, J. 2009. A blind person's interactions with technology. Commun. ACM 52, 8 (Aug. 2009), 58-66. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1536616.1536636

18 September 2009: Under the Hood

Spolsky, Joel (2001, December 11). Back to Basics. Joel on Software. Web page at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html.

25 September 2009: Software, Copyright, and Patent

Boyle, J. (2009). What intellectual property law should learn from software. Commun. ACM 52, 9 (Sep. 2009), 71-76. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1562164.1562184

2 October 2009: History of Programming Languages

A lecture by David Kay entitled Why So Many? A Historical View of the Early Development of Programming Languages. Held in Science 3821.

9 October 2009: Video Analytics

Dr. Harold Trease of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will speak on Video analytics for indexing, summarization and searching streaming video and video archives. Held in Science 3821. Pizza and pop provided!

16 October 2009: Language Humor

Stepney, Susan (ed). (n.d.). How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot. Web resource at http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/foot.htm. One of the more extensive of the many variants of an article from the December 1991 issue of Developer's Insight.

23 October 2009: Fall Break

30 October 2009: RAID

Patterson, D. A., Gibson, G., and Katz, R. H. 1988. A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID). In Proceedings of the 1988 ACM SIGMOD international Conference on Management of Data (Chicago, Illinois, United States, June 01 - 03, 1988). H. Boral and P. Larson, Eds. SIGMOD '88. ACM, New York, NY, 109-116. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=50202.50214.

6 November 2009: Knuthian Humor

Knuth, D. E. 1984. The complexity of songs. Commun. ACM 27, 4 (Apr. 1984), 344-346. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=358027.358042

Quux, The Great. 1984. THE TELNET SONG: ("Control-Uparrow Q."). Commun. ACM 27, 4 (Apr. 1984), 347-348. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=358027.1035691

13 November 2009: The Economics of Open Source

Spolsky, Joel (2002, June 12). Strategy Letter V. Joel on Software. Web page at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

Perens, Bruce (2005). The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source Software. Web page at http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1470/1385.

20 November 2009: Computational Thinking

Wing, J. M. 2006. Computational thinking. Commun. ACM 49, 3 (Mar. 2006), 33-35. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1118178.1118215

4 December 2009: In re: Bilski

11 December 2009: End-of-semester Wrapup