Coping With Linux Distro Fragmentation (visualized in One Giant Diagram)
I describe software incompatibility problems caused by fragmentation in Linux-based operating systems and present one potential solution.
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On the Pleasures of Teaching Computer Science Students
A short reflection on the rewarding experience of teaching students at the time of year when students' degrees are awarded.
Progress on Computing in Schools: 2 Countries, 2 States
Computing is making progress towards becoming a primary and secondary schools subject worldwide. I report on three personal meetings about activities in England and Denmark, and in South Carolina and Maryland.
CHI 2013 in Paris: A Personal Review of the Conference
In this short report I offer some reflections on the 2013 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (commonly known just as "CHI") that took place in Paris last week. The conference had 16 parallel tracks. Therefore, my review is necessarily partial and personal. I urge interested readers to look at the program in more detail, and to review the video "teasers" for the talks. All papers and abstracts are available in full, in the ACM Digital Library.
Encouraging IT Usage in Future Healthcare; Quality in CS Education
Jeannette M. Wing considers how technology acts as a change agent for healthcare, while Mark Guzdial ponders ways to measure quality in computer science education.
The Role of Hypercard in Today’s World
HyperCard is an end-user programming tool from the 1990's. A new version that runs on most modern platforms raises the question of the role of end-user programming and the directions in modern programming languages.
How often have you picked up a scholarly journal in a discipline far removed from your expertise, only to be stymied and mystified by the disciplinary jargon? We cannot all be polymaths, but as writers about our research in computing, we can do more to lower the disciplinary drawbridges and invite readers into our intellectual castle.
What does HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) research involve? In this post, I present two examples of modern HCI research.
Catastrophism and reliance on dubious studies have no place in serious discussions of software engineering.
Securing the Future of Computer Science; Reconsidering Analog Computing
Mark Guzdial sees hope in computer science education efforts in the U.K. Daniel Reed suggests we should not be so quick to discard analog computing.
Nerdy Strutting: How to Put Women Off the Tech Industry
A reflection on how interaction patterns in the tech industry might be off putting to women even if they are not offensive or explicitly exclusive.
As technology continues to eliminate some jobs, how can we use innovation to create more?
How to Build on Code.org in Higher Education
The Code.org videos are terrific. What can we be doing in post-secondary education to support the vision?
What Does ‘Big Data’ Mean (Part 4)?
The "big variety" use case is examined, in this fourth post in a series on big data.
Exascale Software: Just a Few Orders of Magnitude
Extraordinary parallelism, unprecedented data locality and adaptive resilience: these are daunting architecture, system software and application challenges for exascale computing.
Passwords Getting Painful, Computing Still Blissful
Jason Hong wonders how anyone can follow the mounting complexity of password rules, and Daniel Reed ponders the attractions of computing.
Research Questions About MOOCs
Predictions abound on the Internet that MOOCs are about to destroy the university. (Call it, "the MOOCopalypse.") From a stance informed by computing education research, what else would we like to know about MOOCs before we replace our current higher-education system with a MOOC-based one?
When Reviews Do More Than Sting
Bertrand Meyer wonders why malicious reviews run rampant in computer science.
Athena Award Nominations Closing Soon!
Don't miss out on the chance to nominate someone for an Athena Award from ACM-W.
Software Engineering in the Venice of the North
ESEC-FSE 2013 (in Saint Petersburg,, 18-26 August) is the place to be for software engineering in 2013.
Shape the Future of Computing
ACM encourages its members to take a direct hand in shaping the future of the association. There are more ways than ever to get involved.
Get InvolvedCommunications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.
By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.
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