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dateMore Than a Year Ago
subjectComputers And Society
authorPaul Curzon
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Reclaim your name
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Reclaim your name

In 2021 the Canadian government announced that Indigenous people would be allowed to use their ancestral family names on government-issued identity documents. For...

Al-Jazari: the father of robotics
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Al-Jazari: the father of robotics

Science fiction films are full of humanoid robots acting as servants, workers, friends or colleagues. The first were created during the Islamic Golden Age, a thousand...

A PC Success
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

A PC Success

We have moved on to smartphones, tablets and smartwatches, but for 30 years the desktop computer ruled, and originally not just any desktop computer, the IBM PC...

In space no one can hear you …
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

In space no one can hear you …

Johanna Lucht could do maths before she learned language. Why? Because she was born deaf and there was little support for deaf people where she lived. Despite,...

The last piece of the continental drift puzzle
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

The last piece of the continental drift puzzle

A computer helped provide the final piece in the puzzle of how the continents formed and moved around. It gave a convincing demonstration that the Americas, Europe...

The tale of the mote and the petrel
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

The tale of the mote and the petrel

Biology and computer science can meet in some unexpected, not to mention inhospitable, places. Who would have thought that the chemical soup in the nests of Petrels...

Fran Allen: Smart Translation
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Fran Allen: Smart Translation

Computers don't understand the instructions they are given in programs. They have to translate them in to actual computer languages first. Fran Allen won the top...

A gendered timeline of technology
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

A gendered timeline of technology

Women have played a gigantic role in the history of computing. Their ideas form the backbone to modern technology, though that has not always been obvious.

Operational Transformation
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Operational Transformation

How do online word processing programs manage to allow two or more people to change the same document at the same time without getting in a complete muddle? One...

Manufacturing Magic
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Manufacturing Magic

Can computers lend a creative hand to the production of new magic tricks? That's a question Howard Williams and Peter McOwan wrestled with.

News you can trust
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

News you can trust

Having reliable news matters. Artificial Intelligence expert Sameena Shah gave news provider Thomson Reuters a head start with her Artificial Intelligence system...

Object-oriented pizza at the end of the universe
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Object-oriented pizza at the end of the universe

Object-oriented programming is a popular kind of programming. To understand what it is all about it can help to think about cooking a meal (Hitchhiker's Guide to...

Understanding Parties
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Understanding Parties

Kavin Narasimhan studied how people move and form groups at parties, creating realistic computer models of what is going on. Her work could help avatars and robots...

Mood Gloves
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Mood Gloves

When we watch a film, it's not just the pictures that make the experience, it's the soundtrack too. The music and sound effects play a big part in setting the mood...

What the real Pros say
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

What the real Pros say

Here is what some (female) computer scientists and electronic engineers said that they most liked about their job and the subject.

Susan Kare: Icon Draw
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Susan Kare: Icon Draw

Graphical User Interfaces completely changed the way we used computers. A key to their success were clear and simple icons that had clear meanings. They were thanks...

Barbara Liskov: Byzantine birthdays
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Barbara Liskov: Byzantine birthdays

You may not think of computers as argumentative, but some of them do bicker quite a lot, and for good reason. They often need to, including to get things right...

Opinions, Opinions, Opinions
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Opinions, Opinions, Opinions

Social media is full of people’s opinions, whether about politics, movies, things they bought, celebrities or just something in the news. However, sometimes there...

Ingrid Daubechies: Wiggly lines help catching crime
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Ingrid Daubechies: Wiggly lines help catching crime

by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London from the cs4fn women are here special issue. Computer scientists rely on maths a lot. As mathematicians devise new...

Mark Dean: An Inspiration
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Mark Dean: An Inspiration

Black Girls Code aims to teach one million Black girls to code before 2040.
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