2015 has been a busy year in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester (@csmcr). Here is a brief summary of some key activities during 2015 that will be of interest to employers and alumni, with a quick look ahead at what is coming in 2016 including: Industrial mentoring in software engineering Industrial experience Competitions &

There is growing interest in Wikipedia, Wikidata, Commons, and other Wikimedia projects as platforms for opening up the scientific process [1]. The first Wikipedia Science Conference will discuss activities in this area at the Wellcome Collection Conference Centre in London on the 2nd & 3rd September 2015.

#DeepDream manipulated image of the Creation of Adam, some rights reserved (CC-BY) by Kyle McDonald (@kcimc) on flickr Manchester Digital a non-profit trade assocation of around 500 digital businesses in the north west of england. Every year they hold elections at their AGM for members of their council who serve for two years.

[NOTE: This post was written before I deleted my twitter account @dullhunk in 2024, after twitter became a cesspit of misinformation, disinformation and hate now known as X.com.

Teaching Large Classes: Discussion. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA image via Giulia Forsythe on Flickr @giuliaforsythe (This post is part of a series about the New Academics Program (NAP), I’ll be using this blog to scribble notes about the NAP as I work my way through it.) Ask ten different people what effective teaching is and you’ll get ten different answers.

Christmas lectures 2014 by @Ben_Nuttall Our homes are full of technology that we typically take for granted and understand little. Your average smartphone or tablet, for example, is a “black box”, that deliberately discourages modification by tinkering and hacking.

It’s that time of year when people look back at over the year that was 2014 (1-5). The place where I work, celebrated it’s 50th anniversary. Colleagues put together a little booklet of facts and figures with an some accompanying web pages to mark the occasion. My personal favourite factoid compares computing in 2014 with 1964.

Alan Turing Binary code, Shoreditch High Street, London by Chris Beckett on Flickr (CC-BY-NC-ND license) Over at democracy corner, Manchester Digital is interviewing all of its elected council members.

PubMedication: do you get your best ideas in the Pub? CC-BY-ND image via trombone65 on Flickr. Many people claim they get all their best ideas in the pub, but for lots of scientists their best ideas probably come from PubMed.gov – the NCBI’s monster database of biomedical literature.

Three kinds of Software: Enthusiast, Enterprise & Consumer by Aral Balkan It’s getting pretty hard to do anything these days that doesn’t involve software. Our governments, businesses, laboratories, personal lives and entertainment would look very different without the software that makes them tick. How can we classify all this software to make sense of it all?

How to Win the World Cup: Step One: Dream on, Dreamer Are you passionate about your football team? When I say passion I mean passion as in suffering, from the Latin verb patī meaning to suffer. World cups are passionate milestones for many people, they leave indelible marks on the psyche, you remember who you were with, where you were and how your team suffered.