In this week’s edition of The Prototype, we look at how poetry elides AI safeguards, the new boom in nuclear power, sourcing rare earths from seaweed, and more.

We just finished midterms at DePaul, and I am absolutely exhausted. Creating an exam for the new algorithms class along with all the other regularly scheduled things drained me, and even caused me to violate my no work on weekends rule. But I got through it. And as is typical for me (see here and here and here and many more), the exam notes brought a moment of happiness for me.

Today is the first day of the third week of the quarter (yes, DePaul's mid week start in the Fall quarter confuses everyone), and we are off to a good start. The beginning of the academic year always brings more energy with it, since we've had a couple of months to reset. But this Fall quarter feels different for me than recent ones.

The Chicago Police Department’s criminal homicide tally for June, July and August is the lowest in 60 years. And overall violent crime remains near its lowest point in more than four decades.

I moved to Chicago to start graduate school at the University of Chicago almost 34 years ago. While I've written on this blog about how I ended up at the UC, I've never discussed my experience in graduate school. And there is a reason for that: it wasn't a good one. I doubt many Ph.D. students look back fondly on graduate school, but mine had some significant bumps all the way from my first quarter up until my thesis defense.

People who read this blog with any regularity know that I primarily teach introductory programming. There are a lot of reasons for that, of course: there are more sections of introductory programming than anything else in the School of Computing (SoC); pedagogy and learning for introductory programming is one of my research areas and as a result is very interesting to me; I have long served as the course mentor for several introductory programming courses and staying connected to the courses is important; …

Today is the start of final exams at DePaul, ending the long and annoying time of quarter-system purgatory. As a result, I finished my assignment grading last week, something that I always celebrate since grading is the second most hated task of my job. (The most hated: meetings, of course). One of the things that makes grading slightly more palatable to me is when students include unnecessary, but illuminating and sometimes fun, comments in their assignment submissions.

We have officially hit the hardest part of the academic year at DePaul, the time when everyone at a Northern Hemisphere institution on the semester system is done and posting happy graduation pictures on social media but we have another 3 weeks of our quarter. I'm not struggling as much this spring as I have in the past, partly because the students in one of my classes are particularly engaged and are making it easier to keep my energy up.

Last week, CRA shared the news that Greg Hager would be stepping down as NSF Assistant Director for the CISE Directorate. As a follow-up to that announcement, we are sharing the following letter fr…

If you do a search on this blog for the word "failure" you will find a lot of entries, including some dating back more than a decade. In one from 2014, I specifically talk about failure in the introductory programming classes that I teach, and re-reading it I could have written that entry this January, not more than 11 years ago.

I served for many years on the SIGCSE Board, something that I enjoyed doing and something that has many fond memories associated with it. But one of the things that I did not enjoy was being away from Chicago so often on my birthday. The SIGCSE Technical Symposium often happens in early March, and part of the duties of serving on the SIGCSE Board is attending the conference.

Most of January and February have felt like an endless gauntlet of bad news. I had completely forgotten the feeling of relief I had when Biden assumed the presidency of the U.S. and I stopped waking up every morning dreading the news. I definitely remember now the exhausted feeling that comes from constant chaos, except of course that the dread is much worse this time around.

National Science Foundation staff heard the plans at a meeting Tuesday.

The confusion between Teaching-Track and Tenure-Track is creating a class system in academia.

It's the start of a new calendar year, which is traditionally a time for reflecting on what you've been doing and what you might do differently. This January several things are converging to make me think about DEI and broadening participation in computing (BPC). The first event that got me thinking was a talk today by Dale Reed from UIC who shared information about the UIC BPC plan and various approaches they've taken in implementing it.

I have spent a lot time thinking about and working on gender and computing. If you look at my publications, a reasonable chunk of them have to do with representation in computing, including a line of papers about the linked-courses learning community that a colleague and I ran for five years. Of course, I engaged with the issue personally for many, many years before that, experiencing bias that caused me to question continuing with the field at various points.