Two ways to read this. One is “she lost on every substantive claim, completely failed in her attempts to ban trans staff from the workplace, and won mild procedural victories against her employers handling of her case”. The other way is, I guess, “point one is longer so it must be more important”

Finnish train options living up to the extra personal space stereotype: options include paying extra for single seat or paying extra to keep the seat beside you empty.

New blog post about a new paper on the consistency of grading programming assignments. We looked at this under-researched area, finding poor inter-grader consistency and poor self-consistency. More details here: academiccomputing.wordpress.com/2025/09/03/c... and in the paper linked within.

The excellent KCL outreach team are once again running a free 8-week online programme this autumn about AI & CS for Year 12-13 female and non-binary students. Sign up by 28 September, details here: www.kcl.ac.uk/events/unloc...

New blog post about the couple of football games I organised at conferences this summer, including video proof... academiccomputing.wordpress.com/2025/08/26/s... We should do more of this sort of thing!

#ICER2025 took place last week and this seemed a good time to jot down some thoughts on paper length and various other issues that affect ICER's program: academiccomputing.wordpress.com/2025/08/12/i...

Just added the ICER best paper and lasting impact award winners to the ICER front page: icer2025.acm.org Congratulations to all the authors of those papers!

Pycon UK in September features a talk on our Strype project ( strype.org ) from my colleague Pierre, if you're interested and near Manchester. Lots of other interesting-looking talks and a keynote from @felienne.bsky.social - what more could you want?

Trying to get hold of an iron at the hotel and have twice been told "I've put a ticket in our system for it", which of course is software developer speak for "good luck with that, I ain't doing it".

They never seem to think to ask the next question... Without remembering any knowledge how do you know what question to ask AI? How can you sense check it? What are you "thinking critically" about? We went through all this already with Google.

Reads like an early modern social media feed.

Travelled a long way to hear a talk from a guy down the road @milesberry.net

@joshuagl.bsky.social Maybe this actor could voice Strype for us? ericwbailey.website/published/yo...

@joshuagl.bsky.social @felienne.bsky.social Found this while looking up Deadwood... bsky.app/profile/neil...

Can't even decide how to caption this about LA radio. Incredible.

ICER 2025 program is now available, feat. 31 papers: icer2025.acm.org/program/prog... Registration is open for in-person or virtual attendance.

Wasted half a day trying to track down one of those "this is impossible" bugs only to find a directory with test-foo.ts and (stale) test-foo.js in it, which was the cause of the whole trouble. The stale set were the tests that were failing.

With the release of Strype's new graphics API I've written a blog post explaining some of the design decisions we faced and took: academiccomputing.wordpress.com/2025/06/05/s...

Does anyone know of a tool that can take a list of references as input and produce a subset of those references that don't appear to correspond to a published work in any digital library? Detecting reference hallucinations is becoming an important tool for peer review...

It isn't possible to design a school system where everyone leaves with the skills needed for the workplace because *they're all going to do different jobs*. Workplace training needs to be done by employers.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be an AI literate postgraduate student. I put together some thoughts in a blog post: csed.phd/2025/05/17/a.... It's not a how-to guide, more like a reflection on what it means to use generative AI tools critically, responsibly, and with curiosity.

We have a new paper out today in TOCE, featuring our foray into LLM territory to generate hints for stuck novice programmers. Blog post about it, with links to the public/free paper: academiccomputing.wordpress.com/2025/05/30/h...

ATTENTION: Free Computing Teachers Conference Our speakers are now confirmed for CKC 2025: @dsyme.bsky.social @megjlow.bsky.social @beckyfranks.bsky.social @tracygardner.bsky.social @lollypopstar.bsky.social @neilccbrown.bsky.social @suesentance.bsky.social Sign up here: tinyurl.com/CKC-Kings

Using AI to debug syntax escaping issues in generated Python and interestingly it sees a backslash where there is none because of the way I'm escaping invalid tokens that looks like classic backslashes unicode escapes.

Just one university - UCL - employs almost twice as many people as there are working in fishing boats.

We are in urgent need of several Associate Editors to join the ACM TOCE Editorial Board. If you're interested in serving, write Amy at [email protected] and share your reviewing experience and expertise. Without more volunteers to manage our rising submissions, we may have to pause submissions.

This is an extraordinary case, where it would seem a lawyer used AI which in turn invented five fake cases, which were then cited in submissions. Never use AI to do legal research. Ever.

will train WiFi ever work? tl;dr if we build some more mobile towers, yes! www.ft.com/content/99cc...

Save the date! On 5th July, we are hosting the CAS & King's Computing Conference for teachers. If you are a computing teacher and can come to London, have a look at this: a fantastic free event with great talks and workshops. Open for registration now. www.computingatschool.org.uk/events/2025/...

Quite a low bar to get on the news... "There were five participants in the study... Three of the participants were co-authors of the research paper." And the evidence was subjective report. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

One of the arguments behind frame-based editing is that it more naturally allows code to have metadata. One such metadata I'd like in my IDE is "Do not try to commit this line/change", for things like temporary debug logging, or a temporary early return.

ICER progress for those interested: desk rejects just sent so if you submitted a PDF by deadline and haven't had an email by the time of this post, your paper is headed out to review. PC reviewers should be assigned later today, SPC meta-reviewers hopefully tomorrow.

Maintaining long-lived software sometimes leads to odd encounters: this week we received an email asking us to make available a twenty-two year-old version of our software (from Dec 2003!). Was fairly surprised to find we did actually still have a copy.

Or in other words - trying to deal with rising costs by gatekeeping differently rather than dealing with the underlying causes does not have a great track record to say the least.

In 2026, cars will need fewer screens and more buttons to earn 5-star safety rating in Europe. New testing rules will be introduced that require vehicles to have physical controls to earn the highest safety score. This is a good thing for public safety, and a bad thing for companies like Tesla.

I've written up some notes on the #SIGCSE2025 discussion about privacy and accessibility legislation for educational software in a follow-up blog post: academiccomputing.wordpress.com/2025/03/02/f...

Why does 25% AfD among young men spark a thousand "what is going on with young men?" posts yet Die Linke 34% among young women generates...nothing at all? Yes, young men voting for the radical right is an important phenomenon. But so is young women going rad left *at even higher rates*.

Come and do a PhD with us! Interested in programming languages, development tools, HCI and computing education? @neilccbrown.bsky.social and I are jointly supervising a fully funded PhD. Theme: "Debugging and runtime visualisation in a frame-based system". Details www.kcl.ac.uk/study-legacy...

New, slightly dramatically titled blog post: The threat to free/open source tools in American classrooms academiccomputing.wordpress.com/2025/02/21/t... State-level US privacy laws are having knock-on effects that threaten use of open source tools. We'll be discussing at #SIGCSE2025, come join us!

Just sent all of the ICER PC invites and got back various out-of-office replies including one that says the person will be unavailable for all of the month of June. Which is an odd one to see in February...

New blog post: How K-12 CS teachers support students for whom English is not their first language computinged.wordpress.com/2025/02/17/h...

Given that the only reason I ever access Github settings is to make an access token, why is it so hidden away? Makes little sense to be hidden under "Developer Settings" at the very bottom (then a further section), rather than the more obvious "Password and authentication" or "SSH and GPG keys".

Every one of these guys thinks they’re Oppenheimer mixed with Andrew Carnegie and they own something called SplortDotCom that got bought by Boozoo

Remain fascinated by Animal-Computer Interaction. Here I am making programming tools, and there they are making TV remote controls for dogs. dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

"Understanding the low inter-rater agreement on aggressiveness on the Linux Kernel Mailing List" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Interesting paper about running aground while trying to rate aggressiveness in a technical setting.

Looking up stats about which countries are most active in Computing Education Research, found a useful SIGCSE paper but yikes to the UCD entry here...

Exciting news: we're going to be working with JetBrains to add Kotlin support into BlueJ. blogs.kcl.ac.uk/proged/2025/... Work is just beginning, will post more when testing versions are available.

If you want to understand how computer science became more male, you must see Felienne Hermans’ talk at SPLASH. Learn when CS became obsessed with math (1973) and who threw out the social scientists (Dykstra) www.youtube.com/live/-Br66SU... @felienne.bsky.social

Seeking research on closing the gender gap in Computing Science education: what works, what doesn't, evidence-based strategies, global success stories, and recommended academics to connect with. Keen to gather insights to inspire more girls into Computing. Any recommendations?