The Third Bit

1997

P: Hi, I’m a programmer.  I’m starting an online retail company. What do you two do?

G: Hi, I’m a graphic designer. I know how to select and arrange text and images in ways that are appealing, informative, and usable.

M: And I’m in marketing. I know how to identify people’s needs and craft messages that will appeal to them.

P: Huh. Those both seem much simpler to me than programming. I don’t think I need to hire you.

2003

G&M: So, how did your startup do?

P: It tanked. People kept saying the site was ugly and confusing. I guess I should have hired you back in ’97 after all.

2012

P: Hi, I’m a programmer. I’m starting an online education company. What do you do?

T: Hi, I’m a teacher. I know how to select and arrange learning materials in ways that are appealing, informative, and effective.

P: Huh. That seems simpler to me than programming…

Learning

Earlier today, a friend of mine used his iPhone to shell into a remote machine, edit a file with Vi, and commit it to version control:

Yes, that’s right: he used a hand-held computer a million times more powerful than any available in 1970 to connect over a ubiquitous wireless network to a computer billions of times more powerful than any available in 1970 to run a set of tools that do their best to emulate a line printer. Coincidentally, at about the same time as he was doing this, I was holding a sticky note with “Can you hear me?” written on it up in front of the camera built into my laptop to transmit a real-time video image to people thousands of kilometers away because, well, because it was simpler than anything else I could do at the time.

All of which prompts me to rephrase William Gibson: the past is still here, it’s just not evenly distributed either.

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Maya is a little girl who faces some big challenges:

Now, Prentke Romich Company and Semantic Compaction Systems want to take away the software that let her say, “Daddy, I love you,” for the very first time. It’s all about patents, except it’s not: it’s about big companies abusing the patent system to smother smaller ones.

I don’t normally get involved in online campaigns, or ask other people to, but this one’s different. Apple recently took down the app that lets Maya speak because the patent dispute hadn’t been resolved, and there’s the very real risk that they might disable it remotely. Please tell them, and Prentke Romich, what you think, and please show your support for Speak for Yourself (the company that makes the app).

• The whole story
• The “contact us” email address listed on Prentke Romich’s website: info@prentrom.com
• The email address listed in the court documents for Apple: appstorenotices@apple.com
• Prentke Romich’s Facebook page
• Speak for Yourself’s Facebook page

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I’m trying to compile a list of grassroots “learn to program” organizations that are explicitly trying to broaden participation in computing beyond the current white-and-Asian male demographic. So far, I know of the ones listed below; if you know of others, I’d welcome pointers. (Note: while I think that the Anita Borg Institute and others are doing great work, I’m mostly interested in groups trying to build new on ramps, rather than groups supporting women who are already in tech.)

• Black Girls Code
• Women Who Code
• GirlDevelopIt
• Ladies Learning Code
• Pyladies
• Railsbridge
• Boston Python Workshop
• Girls Who Code

Equity

PPIG Workshop 2012, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK 5th-th-7th September.

Deadlines

Full Papers 10th July
Short Papers/Work in progress 8 August
Doctorial Consortium 31st July

The Psychology of Programming Group (PPIG) invites abstracts for the 2012 meeting, to be held at Newcastle University, UK.

PPIG wants papers on the psychological aspects of every area of software development: education, language design, software engineering, programmer team working etc. Papers can adopt a strictly theoretical approach, be entirely empirical, or feature a mix of both—whatever is appropriate. The list of possible themes has grown over the years and currently looks like this :

• Empirical studies of programming
• Programming education and skills acquisition
• Human centred design and evaluation of programming languages, tools and infrastructure
• Programming and human cognition
• Human Computer Interaction issues in programming
• Team/co-operative work in programming
• End user programming
• Distributed programming, globalisation, work in large teams
• Free/libre open source software development
• Software engineering methods, planning, estimation, agility etc.
• Gender, age, culture and programming
• New paradigms in programming
• Code quality, readability and re-use
• Mistakes, bugs, and error handling
• Working with notation
• Specialist and domain centred programming tools and languages
• Unconventional interactions and quasi-programming

However, we are open to any new ideas and topics.

SUBMISSION

Full papers should be 12 pages or less; Short Papers and Work in Progress reports are also welcome. To format your paper, please use the PPIG Word Template or the LaTeX template, which will be available from the website which will be online shortly. The programme committee will review all submitted papers and, based on their reviews, each accepted paper will be classified as a “Full Technical Paper” or a “Work in Progress Report”. All papers accepted for presentation at PPIG 2012 will appear in the workshop proceedings and be archived on the PPIG website.

Authors may also submit a Short Paper or a Work in Progress Report, clearly marked as such, to describe conjectural, late-breaking or tentative results. The refereeing process will be suitably lighter. Papers for the workshop should be submitted to Lindsay.marshall@ncl.ac.uk with a subject line reading “PPIG2012 Paper Submission: [Title of Paper]” and have a PDF version of the paper paper as an attachment.

Doctoral Consortium

The PPIG Workshop will again hold a doctoral consortium. The event is for research students at all stages of doctoral study. The event will include brief introductions by each of the students (about 10 minutes, plus time for questions, depending on the numbers involved) and sessions on the process and practice of Ph.D. research. Experienced researcher will take part as ‘discussants’ to give other perspectives and to provide feedback on individual research programs.

Submission: applications must provide an overview of your research (max 5 pages) and be submitied by email to M.Kutar@salford.ac.uk with the subject ‘PPIG2011 doctoral consortium submission’. The submission should be in PDF format.

Dates

• 10 July: submission of draft papers
• 10 August: authors will be notified
• 22 August: final camera-ready copy to be received

Announcements

Here’s a typical day:

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From George Orwell’s diary, June 6, 1942:

I saw that I was up against the official mind, which sees everything as a problem in administration and does not grasp that at a certain point, ie. when certain economic interest are menaced, public spirit ceases to function. [The basic assumption of such people is that everyone wants the world to function properly and will do his best to keep the wheels running. They don’t realise that most of those who have the power don’t care a damn about the world as a whole and are only intent on feathering their own nests.] I can’t help feeling a strong impression that Cripps has already been got at. Not with money or anything of that kind of course, nor even by flattery and the sense of power, which in all probability he genuinely doesn’t care about: but simply by responsibility, which automatically makes a man timid. Besides, as soon as you are in power your perspectives are foreshortened. Perhaps a bird’s eye view is as distorted as a worm’s eye view.

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