Computer Science | Grinnell College

At CS Table on Friday, 13 November 2009, we will consider economics of Open-Source software. Our primary reading will be a short piece from Joel on Software and an optional piece by Bruce Perens. However, participants are welcome to bring other pertinent readings.

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 https://www.ojphi.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1470/1385.

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.

Every computer science major should read at least a little bit of Knuth before he or she graduates. This Friday for CS Table, we consider one of Knuth's lighter pieces, "The Complexity of Songs".

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

At Mr. Stone's recommendation, we will also consider a song that accompanied that article.

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

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.

It's the week after break. We think that you're up to something a bit deeper and a bit more challenging. Hence, we're going to read the first major paper on RAID (not the bug spray, but the disk technology). Copies are available outside Professor Rebelsky's office.

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.

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.

It's the day before break. We know that people won't be up for a deep discussion. Hence, CS Table this coming Friday, we are going to consider a classic bit of language humor: "How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot" (in your favorite programming language). Because it's a classic bit of CS humor, it has spawned many extensions and variants since its original publication in 1991. We'll work with a fairly nice extension (described below), but you can also search for other versions.

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.

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.

At noon on Friday, October 9, Dr. Harold Trease of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will speak on Video analytics for indexing, summarization and searching streaming video and video archives:

Given streaming video or video archives, how does one effectively summarize, classify, and search the information contained within such a large amount of image data? In this presentation, we address these issues by describing a process for the automated generation of a table of contents and of keyword, topic-based index tables that can be used to catalogue, summarize, and search large amounts of video data. Having the ability to index and search the information contained within the videos, beyond just metadata tags, provides a mechanism to extract and identify useful content. During this presentation, we describe some of the mathematics, computer science and engineering, and applications of being able to use image and video keywords as the primary search criteria, much as Web browsers (such as Google) allow us to search text today.

Dr. Trease is a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Kearney and received his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in nuclear engineering. He has more than thirty years of research experience in the design, implementation, and application of high-throughput, high-performance computer software. He currently leads the P3D Code Development Project. P3D is a large-scale framework for modeling, simulation, and prediction in computational physics.

Pizza and soda will be served before the talk. Everyone is welcome to attend!

This lecture serves as this week's CS Table.

At noon on Friday, October 2, in Science 3821, Professor David G. Kay will give a presentation entitled Why so many?: A historical view of the early development of programming languages:

Java. Scheme. C++. Python. There are dozens of programming languages in common use today. Each has its adherents -- often highly partisan adherents. High-level programming languages have been available at least since Fortran in 1954; why haven't we agreed on a common language by now? Why is there so much heat (and so little light) when programming languages are compared? We try to answer these questions with a historical look at how and why some of the major programming languages were developed. We find that, as with many technical issues, the ultimate success of a programming language depends as much on social, economic, and historical factors as it does on the technical merits.

Professor Kay teaches in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, where he holds appointments in the departments of Informatics and Computer Science and serves as Vice Chair of Informatics. He has degrees in linguistics, law, and computer science; his current academic interests include computer law, computer science education, software engineering, human-computer interaction, and the teaching of writing and other communication skills.

Pizza and soda will be served before the talk. Everyone is welcome to attend!

This talk also serves as this week's CS Table.

This week in Computer Science Table, we are exploring an intersection of software and the law. In particular, we're considering some issues of copyright and patent in software, and what those issues reveal about the U.S. intellectual property system.

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

CS Table meets at noon on Fridays in JRC 224A. All are welcome. Computer science students and faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.

This week in Computer Science Table, we're exploring a different side of things. In particular, we are considering some under the hood issues in some common programming areas, such as strings, memory allocation, and databases.

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

Some questions to think about for this meeting: How are strings represented internally in your favorite programming languages? If you had a choice of how to represent strings internally, what would you do? Are all versions of malloc created equivalent? What flaws do you see in Spolsky's comments?

CS Table meets at noon on Fridays in JRC 224A. All are welcome. Computer science students and faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.

On Friday, September 11, the topic of CS Table is 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

Copies of the reading will be available outside Sam Rebelsky's office, Science 3824.

CS Table meets at noon in JRC 224A. All are welcome. Computer science students and faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.

Computer science table is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

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