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Computer Science Table

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.

Here you may find our schedule of past and future topics.

Forthcoming Meetings

20 November 2009: Computational Thinking
Wing, J. M. 2006. Computational thinking. Commun. ACM 49, 3 (Mar. 2006), 33-35. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1118178.1118215
27 November 2009: Thanksgiving Break
4 December 2009: TBD
11 December 2009: End-of-semester Wrapup

Some Planned Topics

Please submit your own suggestions.

Software patents, revisited: In Re Biliski
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2009022607324398
Open-Sourcing Art
http://www.osbr.ca/ojs/index.php/osbr/article/view/980/943
Native Language vs. Programming Language
Question: What effect does your native language have on the way you program and comment?
Reading TBD.
Cryptography
Reading TBD
Challenging Your Programming Skills
Project Euler
Scripting
Ousterhout: Scripting: Higher Level Programming for the 21st Century
Open Source in the Curriculum
Open source in the curriculum: Morelli, R., Tucker, A., Danner, N., De Lanerolle, T. R., Ellis, H. J., Izmirli, O., Krizanc, D., and Parker, G. 2009. Revitalizing computing education through free and open source software for humanity. Commun. ACM 52, 8 (Aug. 2009), 67-75. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1536616.1536635

Recent Meetings

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=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1536616.1536636
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=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1562164.1562184
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=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/50202.50214.
6 November 2009: Knuthian Humor
Knuth, D. E. 1984. The complexity of songs. Commun. ACM 27, 4 (Apr. 1984), 344-346. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/358027.358042
Quux, The Great. 1984. THE TELNET SONG: ("Control-Uparrow Q."). Commun. ACM 27, 4 (Apr. 1984), 347-348. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/358027.1035691
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://perens.com/Articles/Economic.html.

Past Semesters

We have only been recording the topics of CS Table since Fall 2008.