Author: Jo Brodie

https://twitter.com/JoBrodie same on BlueSky and other pages. Old photo!

Find your own time zone

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The theme for British Science Week 2024 is Time so here we’re going back in time to our archives to bring you this article about… time. Below are the instructions to find out your own personal time zone but be careful if you’re sharing your results with others, remember that your longitude (if combined with your latitude) can give away your location.

Andy Broomfield has given us the secret to figuring out your own personal time zone based on your longitude! Now you can figure out your time zone right down to the second, just like his gadget did.

Step one: find your longitude

First you need find out the longitude of the place you’re at. Longitude is the measure of where you are on the globe in an east-west direction (the north-south measurement is called latitude).

The best resource to do this is Google Earth, which will give you a very accurate longitude reading in degrees, minutes and seconds. Just find your location in Google Earth, and when you hover your mouse over it, the latitude and longitude are in the bottom right corner of the window.

There are alternatives to Google Earth online, but they tend to only work for one country rather than the whole world. If you can’t use Google Earth, try an internet search for finding longitude in your country.

If you’ve got a GPS system (e.g. on your phone), you can get it to tell you your longitude as well.

Step two: find your time zone

We’ll be finding your time relative to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT or UTC), the base for timekeeping all over the world. If your Longitude is west of 0° you’ll be behind GMT, and if it’s east then you’ll be ahead of it.

Longitude is usually measured in degrees, minutes and seconds. Here’s how longitude converts into your personal time zone:
• 15 degrees of longitude = 1 hour difference; 1 degree longitude = 4 minutes difference.
• 15 minutes of longitude = 1 minute difference; 1 minute of longitude = 4 seconds difference.
• 15 seconds of longitude = 1 second difference, 1 second of longitude = 0.066(recurring) seconds difference.

The best way to find your personal time zone is to convert the whole thing into seconds of longitude, then into seconds of time. Do this by adding together:

(degrees x 3600) + (minutes x 60) + (seconds)

You’ll get a big number – that’s your seconds in longitude. Then if you divide that big number by 15, that’s how many seconds your personal time zone is different from GMT. Once you’ve got that, you can convert it back into hours, minutes and seconds.

An example

Let’s find the personal time zone for the President of the United States. The White House is at 77° 2′ 11.7″ West, so converting this all to seconds of longitude gives:

(degrees x 3600) + (minutes x 60) + (seconds)
= (77 x 3600) + (2 x 60) + (11.7)
= (277,200) + (120) + (11.7)
= 277,331.7

Now we find the time zone difference in seconds of time:

277,331.7 / 15 = 18,488.78 seconds

This means that the President is 18,488.78 seconds behind GMT. Next it’s the slightly fiddly business of expanding those seconds back into hours, minutes and seconds. Because time is based on units of 60 rather than 10, dividing hours and minutes into decimals doesn’t tell you much. You’ll have to use whole numbers and figure out the remainders. Here’s how.

If you divide 18,488.78 by 3600 (the number of seconds in an hour), you’ll find out how many hours can fit in all of those seconds. The answer is 5, with some left over. 5 hours is 18,000 seconds (because 5 x 3600 = 18,000), so now you’re left with 488.78 seconds to deal with. Divide 488.78 by the number of seconds in a minute (60), and you get 8, plus some left over. 8 x 60 is 480, so you’ve got 8.78 seconds still left.

That means that the president’s personal time zone at the White House is 5 hours, 8 minutes and 8.78 seconds behind GMT.

If you’re using decimal longitude

Longitude is usually measured in degrees, minutes and seconds, but sometimes, like if you use a GPS receiver, you might get a measurement that just lists your longitude in degrees with a decimal. For example, the CS4FN office is located at 0.042 degrees west.

Figuring out your time zone with a decimal is simpler than with degrees, minutes and seconds. It’s just one calculation! Just take your decimal longitude and divide it by 0.004167.

So the local time at the CS4FN office is:

(longitude) / 0.004167
= (0.042) / 0.004167
= 10.079 seconds behind GMT

The only problem with this simple calculation is that it’s not as accurate as the one above for degrees, minutes and seconds. Plus, if you get a large number of seconds you’ll still have to do the last step from the method above, where you convert seconds back into hours and minutes.

Now you’ve got your own personal time zone!

Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

More on …

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The Social Machine of Maths

Two heads with a shared thought bubble of numbers
Thinking maths image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

In school we learn about the maths that others have invented: results that great mathematicians like Euclid, Pythagoras, Newton or Leibniz worked out. We follow algorithms for getting results they devised. Ada Lovelace was actually taught by one of the great mathematicians, Augustus De Morgan, who invented important laws, ‘De Morgan’s laws’ that are a fundamental basis for the logical reasoning computer scientists now use. Real maths is about discovering new results of course not just using old ones, and the way that is done is changing.

We tend to think of maths as something done by individual geniuses: an isolated creative activity, to produce a proof that other mathematicians then check. Perhaps the greatest such feat of recent years was Andrew WIles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. It was a proof that had evaded the best mathematicians for hundreds of years. Wiles locked himself away for 7 years to finally come up with a proof. Mathematics is now at a remarkable turning point. Computer science is changing the way maths is done. New technology is radically extending the power and limits of individuals. “Crowdsourcing” pulls together diverse experts to solve problems; computers that manipulate symbols can tackle huge routine calculations; and computers, using programs designed to verify hardware, check proofs that are just too long and complicated for any human to understand. Yet these techniques are currently used in stand-alone fashion, lacking integration with each other or with human creativity or fallibility.

‘Social machines’ are a whole new paradigm for viewing a combination of people and computers as a single problem-solving entity. The idea was identified by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world-wide web. A project led by Ursula Martin at the University of Oxford explored how to make this a reality, creating a mathematics social machine – a combination of people, computers, and archives to create and apply mathematics. The idea is to change the way people do mathematics, so transforming the reach, pace, and impact of mathematics research. The first step involves social science rather than maths or computing though – studying what working mathematicians really do when working on new maths, and how they work together when doing crowdsourced maths. Once that is understood it will then be possible to develop tools to help them work as part of such a social machine.

The world changing mathematics results of the future may be made by social machines rather than solo geniuses. Team work, with both humans and computers is the future.

– Ursula Martin, University of Oxford
and Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

Related Magazine …

Related Magazine …

The history of computational devices: automata, core rope memory (used by NASA in the Moon landings), Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine (never built) and Difference Engine made of cog wheels and levers, mercury delay lines, standardising the size of machine parts, Mary Coombs and the Lyons tea shop computer, computers made of marbles, i-Ching and binary, Ada Lovelace and music, a computer made of custard, a way of sorting wood samples with index cards and how to work out your own programming origin story.

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

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Software for Justice

A fingerprint benig scanned electronically
Digital fingerprint image by ar130405 from Pixabay

A jury is given misleading information in court by an expert witness. An innocent person goes to prison as a result. This shouldn’t happen, but unfortunately it does and more often than you might hope. It’s not because the experts or lawyers are trying to mislead but because of some tricky mathematics. Fortunately, a team of computer scientists at Queen Mary, University of London are leading the way in fixing the problem.

The Queen Mary team, led by Professor Norman Fenton, is trying to ensure that forensic evidence involving probability and statistics can be presented without making errors, even when the evidence is incredibly complex. Their solution is based on specialist software they have developed.

Many cases in courts rely on evidence like DNA and fibre matching for proof. When police investigators find traces of this kind of evidence from the crime scene they try to link it to a suspect. But there is a lot of misunderstanding about what it means to find a match. Surprisingly, a DNA match between, say, a trace of blood found at the scene and blood taken from a suspect does not mean that the trace must have come from the suspect.

Forensic experts talk about a ‘random match probability’. It is just the probability that the suspect’s DNA matches the trace if it did not actually come from him or her. Even a one-in-a-billion random match probability does not prove it was the suspect’s trace. Worse, the random match probability an expert witness might give is often either wrong or misleading. This can be because it fails to take account of potential cross-contamination, which happens when samples of evidence accidentally get mixed together, or even when officers leave traces of their own DNA from handling the evidence. It can also be wrong due to mistakes in the way the evidence was collected or tested. Other problems arise if family members aren’t explicitly ruled out, as that makes the random match probability much higher. When the forensic match is from fibre or glass, the random match probabilities are even more uncertain.

The potential to get the probabilities wrong isn’t restricted to errors in the match statistics, either. Suppose the match probability is one in ten thousand. When the experts or lawyers present this evidence they often say things like: “The probability that the trace came from anybody other than the defendant is one in ten thousand.” That statement sounds OK but it isn’t true.

The problem is called the prosecutor fallacy. You can’t actually conclude anything about the probability that the trace belonged to the defendant unless you know something about the number of potential suspects. Suppose this is the only evidence against the defendant and that the crime happened on an island where the defendant was one of a million adults who could have committed the crime. Then the random match probability of one in ten thousand actually means that about one hundred of those million adults match the trace. So the probability of innocence is ninety-nine out of a hundred! That’s very different from the one in ten thousand probability implied by the statement given in court.

Norman Fenton’s work is based around a theorem, called Bayes’ theorem, which gives the correct way to calculate these kinds of probabilities. The theorem is over 250 years old but it is widely misunderstood and, in all but the simplest cases is very difficult to calculate properly. Most cases include many pieces of related evidence – including evidence about the accuracy of the testing processes. To keep everything straight, experts need to build a model called a Bayesian network. It’s like a graph that maps out different possibilities and the chances that they are true. You can imagine that in almost any court case, this gets complicated awfully quickly. It is only in the last 20 years that researchers have discovered ways to perform the calculations for Bayesian networks, and written software to help them. What Norman and his team have done is develop methods specifically for modelling legal evidence as Bayesian networks in ways that are understandable by lawyers and expert witnesses.

Norman and his colleague Martin Neil have provided expert evidence (for lawyers) using these methods in several high-profile cases. Their methods help lawyers to determine the true value of any piece of evidence – individually or in combination. They also help show how to present probabilistic arguments properly.

Unfortunately, although scientists accept that Bayes’ theorem is the only viable method for reasoning about probabilistic evidence, it’s not often used in court, and is even a little controversial. Norman is leading an international group to help bring Bayes’ theorem a little more love from lawyers, judges and forensic scientists. Although changes in legal practice happen very slowly (lawyers still wear powdered wigs, after all), hopefully in the future the difficult job of judging evidence will be made easier and fairer with the help of Bayes’ theorem.

If that happens, then thanks to some 250 year-old maths combined with some very modern computer science, fewer innocent people will end up in jail. Given the innocent person in the dock could one day be you, you will probably agree that’s a good thing.

Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London (originally published in 2011)

More on … justice

  • Edie Schlain Windsor and same sex marriage
    • Edie was a computer scientist whose marriage to another woman was deemed ineligible for certain rights provided (at that time) only in a marriage between a man and a woman. She fought for those rights and won.

Related Magazine …

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

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Designing robots that care

Happy robot mobile image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay

by Nicola Plant, Queen Mary University of London

Think of the perfect robot companion. A robot you can hang out with, chat to and who understands how you feel. Robots can already understand some of what we say and talk back. They can even respond to the emotions we express in the tone of our voice. But, what about body language? We also show how we feel by the way we stand, we describe things with our hands and we communicate with the expressions on our faces. Could a robot use body language to show that it understands how we feel? Could a robot show empathy?

If a robot companion did show this kind of empathetic body language we would likely feel that it understood us, and shared our feelings and experiences. For robots to be able to behave like this though, we first need to understand more about how humans use movement to show empathy with one another.

Think about how you react when a friend talks about their headache. You wouldn’t stay perfectly still. But what would you do? We’ve used motion capture to track people’s movements as they talk to each other. Motion capture is the technology used in films to make computer-animated creatures like Gollum in Lord of the Rings, or the Apes in the Planet of the Apes. Lots of cameras are used together to create a very precise computer model of the movements being recorded. Using motion capture, we’ve been able to see what people actually do when chatting about their experiences.

It turns out that we share our understanding of things like a headache by performing it together. We share the actions of the headache as if we have it ourselves. If I hit my head, wince and say ‘ouch’, you might wince and say ‘ouch’ too – you give a multimodal performance, with actions and words, to show me you understand how I feel.

So should we just program robots to copy us? It isn’t as simple as that. We don’t copy exactly. A perfect copy wouldn’t show understanding of how we feel. A robot doing that would seem like a parrot, repeating things without any understanding. For the robot to show that it understands how you feel it must perform a headache like it owns it – as though it were really theirs! That means behaving in a similar way to you; but adapted to the unique type of headache it has.

Designing the way robots should behave in social situations isn’t easy. If we work out exactly how humans interact with each other to share their experiences though, we can use that understanding to program robot companions. Then one day your robot friend will be able to hang out with you, chat and show they understand how you feel. Just like a real friend.

multimodal = two or more different ways of doing something. With communication that might be spoken words, facial expressions and hand gestures.

Related Magazine …

See also (previous post and related career options)

AMPER: AI helping future you remember past you
Click to read about the AMPER project

We have recently written about the AMPER project which uses a tablet-based AI tool / robot to support people with dementia and their carers. It prompts the person to discuss events from their younger life and adapts to their needs. We also linked this with information about the types of careers people working in this area might do – the examples given were for a project based in the Netherlands called ‘Dramaturgy for Devices’ – using lessons learned from the study of theatre and theatrical performances in designing social robots so that their behaviour feels more natural and friendly to the humans who’ll be using them.

Job, Netherlands (Utrecht): PhD in Performing Arts and Robotics, clos 21 Jan 2024
Click to see one of the four jobs in this area with another three linked from it

See our collection of posts about Career paths in Computing.

Career paths in Computing

EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1.

AMPER: AI helping future you remember past you

by Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London

Old photos image by Karolina Grabowska from Pixabay

Have you ever heard a grown up say “I’d completely forgotten about that!” and then share a story from some long-forgotten memory? While most of us can remember all sorts of things from our own life history it sometimes takes a particular cue for us to suddenly recall something that we’d not thought about for years or even decades. 

As we go through life we add more and more memories to our own personal library, but those memories aren’t neatly organised like books on a shelf. For example, can you remember what you were doing on Thursday 20th September 2018 (or can you think of a way that would help you find out)? You’re more likely to be able to remember what you were doing on the last Tuesday in December 2018 (but only because it was Christmas Day!). You might not spontaneously recall a particular toy from your childhood but if someone were to put it in your hands the memories about how you played with it might come flooding back.

Accessing old memories

In Alzheimer’s Disease (a type of dementia) people find it harder to form new memories or retain more recent information which can make daily life difficult and bewildering and they may lose their self-confidence. Their older memories, the ones that were made when they were younger, are often less affected however. The memories are still there but might need drawing out with a prompt, to help bring them to the surface.

old newspaper
Perhaps a newspaper advert will jog your memory in years to come… Image by G.C. from Pixabay

An EPSRC-funded project at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland is developing a tablet-based ‘story facilitator’ agent (a software program designed to adapt its response to human interaction) which contains artificial intelligence to help people with Alzheimer’s disease and their carers. The device, called ‘AMPER’*, could improve wellbeing and a sense of self in people with dementia by helping them to uncover their ‘autobiographical memories’, about their own life and experiences – and also help their carers remember them ‘before the disease’.

Our ‘reminiscence bump’

We form some of our most important memories between our teenage years and early adulthood – we start to develop our own interests in music and the subjects that we like studying, we might experience first loves, perhaps going to university, starting a career and maybe a family. We also all live through a particular period of time where we’re each experiencing the same world events as others of the same age, and those experiences are fitted into our ‘memory banks’ too. If someone was born in the 1950s then their ‘reminiscence bump’ will be events from the 1970s and 1980s – those memories are usually more available and therefore people affected by Alzheimer’s disease would be able to access them until more advanced stages of the disease process. Big important things that, when we’re older, we’ll remember more easily if prompted.

In years to come you might remember fun nights out with friends.
Image by ericbarns from Pixabay

Talking and reminiscing about past life events can help people with dementia by reinforcing their self-identity, and increasing their ability to communicate – at a time when they might otherwise feel rather lost and distressed. 

“AMPER will explore the potential for AI to help access an individual’s personal memories residing in the still viable regions of the brain by creating natural, relatable stories. These will be tailored to their unique life experiences, age, social context and changing needs to encourage reminiscing.”

Dr Mei Yii Lim, who came up with the idea for AMPER(3).

Saving your preferences

AMPER comes pre-loaded with publicly available information (such as photographs, news clippings or videos) about world events that would be familiar to an older person. It’s also given information about the person’s likes and interests. It offers examples of these as suggested discussion prompts and the person with Alzheimer’s disease can decide with their carer what they might want to explore and talk about. Here comes the clever bit – AMPER also contains an AI feature that lets it adapt to the person with dementia. If the person selects certain things to talk about instead of others then in future the AI can suggest more things that are related to their preferences over less preferred things. Each choice the person with dementia makes now reinforces what the AI will show them in future. That might include preferences for watching a video or looking at photos over reading something, and the AI can adjust to shorter attention spans if necessary. 

“Reminiscence therapy is a way of coordinated storytelling with people who have dementia, in which you exercise their early memories which tend to be retained much longer than more recent ones, and produce an interesting interactive experience for them, often using supporting materials — so you might use photographs for instance”

Prof Ruth Aylett, the AMPER project’s lead at Heriot-Watt University(4).

When we look at a photograph, for example, the memories it brings up haven’t been organised neatly in our brain like a database. Our memories form connections with all our other memories, more like the branches of a tree. We might remember the people that we’re with in the photo, then remember other fun events we had with them, perhaps places that we visited and the sights and smells we experienced there. AMPER’s AI can mimic the way our memories branch and show new information prompts based on the person’s previous interactions.

​​Although AMPER can help someone with dementia rediscover themselves and their memories it can also help carers in care homes (who didn’t know them when they were younger) learn more about the person they’re caring for.

*AMPER stands for ‘Agent-based Memory Prosthesis to Encourage Reminiscing’.

Suggested classroom activities – find some prompts!

  • What’s the first big news story you and your class remember hearing about? Do you think you will remember that in 60 years’ time?
  • What sort of information about world or local events might you gather to help prompt the memories for someone born in 1942, 1959, 1973 or 1997? (Remember that their reminiscence bump will peak in the 15 to 30 years after they were born – some of them may still be in the process of making their memories the first time!).

See also

If you live near Blackheath in South East London why not visit the Age Exchange and reminiscence centre which is an arts charity providing creative group activities for those living with dementia and their carers. It has a very nice cafe.

Related careers

The AMPER project is interdisciplinary, mixing robots and technology with psychology, healthcare and medical regulation.

We have information about four similar-ish job roles on our TechDevJobs blog that might be of interest. This was a group of job adverts for roles in the Netherlands related to the ‘Dramaturgy^ for Devices’ project. This is a project linking technology with the performing arts to adapt robots’ behaviour and improve their social interaction and communication skills.

Below is a list of four job adverts (which have now closed!) which include information about the job description, the types of people that the employers were looking for and the way in which they wanted them to apply. You can find our full list of jobs that involve computer science directly or indirectly here.

^Dramaturgy refers to the study of the theatre, plays and other artistic performances.

Dramaturgy for Devices – job descriptions

More on …

1. Agent-based Memory Prosthesis to Encourage Reminiscing (AMPER) Gateway to Research
2. The Digital Human: Reminiscence (13 November 2023) BBC Sounds – a radio programme that talks about the AMPER Project.
3. Storytelling AI set to improve wellbeing of people with dementia (14 March 2022) Heriot-Watt University news
4. AMPER project to improve life for people with dementia (14 January 2022) The Engineer

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

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Singing bird – a human choir, singing birdsong

Image by Dieter from Pixabay

“I’m in a choir”. “Really, what do you sing?” “I did a blackbird last week, but I think I’m going to be woodpecker today, I do like a robin though!”

This is no joke! Marcus Coates a British artist, got up very early, and working with a wildlife sound recordist, Geoff Sample, he used 14 microphones to record the dawn chorus over lots of chilly mornings. They slowed the sounds down and matched up each species of bird with different types of human voices. Next they created a film of 19 people making bird song, each person sang a different bird, in their own habitats, a car, a shed even a lady in the bath! The 19 tracks are played together to make the dawn chorus. See it on YouTube below.

Marcus didn’t stop there, he wrote a new bird song score. Yes, for people to sing a new top ten bird hit, but they have to do it very slowly. People sing ‘bird’ about 20 times slower than birds sing ‘bird’ ‘whooooooop’, ‘whooooooop’, ‘tweeeeet’. For a special performance, a choir learned the new song, a new dawn chorus, they sang the slowed down version live, which was recorded, speeded back up and played to the audience, I was there! It was amazing! A human performance, became a minute of tweeting joy. Close your eyes and ‘whoop’ you were in the woods, at the crack of dawn!

Computationally thinking a performance

Computational thinking is at the heart of the way computer scientists solve problems. Marcus Coates, doesn’t claim to be a computer scientist, he is an artist who looks for ways to see how people are like other animals. But we can get an idea of what computational thinking is all about by looking at how he created his sounds. Firstly, he and wildlife sound recordist, Geoff Sample, had to focus on the individual bird sounds in the original recordings, ignore detail they didn’t need, doing abstraction, listening for each bird, working out what aspects of bird sound was important. They looked for patterns isolating each voice, sometimes the bird’s performance was messy and they could not hear particular species clearly, so they were constantly checking for quality. For each bird, they listened and listened until they found just the right ‘slow it down’ speed. Different birds needed different speeds for people to be able to mimic and different kinds of human voices suited each bird type: attention to detail mattered enormously. They had to check the results carefully, evaluating, making sure each really did sound like the appropriate bird and all fitted together into the Dawn Chorus soundscape. They also had to create a bird language, another abstraction, a score as track notes, and that is just an algorithm for making sounds!

Fun to try

Use your computational thinking skills to create a notation for an animal’s voice, a pet perhaps? A dog, hamster or cat language, what different sounds do they make, and how can you note them down. What might the algorithm for that early morning “I want my breakfast” look like? Can you make those sounds and communicate with your pet? Or maybe stick to tweeting? (You can follow @cs4fn on Twitter too).

Enjoy the slowed-down performance of this pet starling which has added a variety of mimicked sounds to its song repertoire.

Jane Waite, Queen Mary University of London


Watch …

Related Magazine …

EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1.

Eggheads: helping us to visualise objects and classes

Ada the Egghead: a purple face with pinky purple hair
Ada the Egghead
Image by Daniel Gill for CS4FN

Past CS4FN articles have explored object-oriented programming through self-aware pizza and Strictly Come Dancing judges. But, if you’re one of those people who like to learn visually, it can be challenging to imagine what an object or class looks like. This article will hopefully help you to both think more about what makes this paradigm so useful as well as to give you a way to visualise objects.

To begin this adventure, I’d like to introduce Ada. Ada is an example of the newly discovered species egghead. Every egghead has very distinctive hair and eye colours. For example, Ada’s hair is a delightfully bright pink, and their eyes, a deep red. Despite their appearance, the egghead has a vicious roar intended to ward off predators, or indeed poachers.

Classes

As computer scientists, we might want to represent different eggheads in a program, but we don’t really want to store information about the eggheads with a written description or an image, because this would be harder than need-be for a computer to ‘understand’ (or rather to process as they don’t understand as such). Instead, we can store lots of individual features together, so that the computer can find out exactly what it needs from each egghead.

Egghead Name Hair Eyes Roar button
Egghead class. Image by Daniel Gill for CS4FN

One way to achieve this is by using a class. A class is a template which contains spaces for us to fill in details for the thing we want to represent. For the egghead, we might want to store data about their name, hair colour, and eye colour – then we can fill in the template for each of the eggheads we find. These individual features are often called attributes. In a program, these attributes would be represented with variables: a place where a value, a piece of data, is stored. We can visualise a class therefore as a box with gaps to fill in for the attributes like the one on the left.

From this image, you will see alongside the attributes, we also have an image of a button for roaring. As well as storing attributes, we also define behaviours. These are actions that we can perform on the thing being represented. We visualise any behaviour as such a button. For this example, we could imagine that pressing this button might provoke the egghead causing them to roar. In programming, a behaviour is represented by a procedure, some pre-defined code that when executed makes something happen. A button that causes something to happen is a simple way to visualise such procedures.

A key point to realise is that this class is simply a template – it isn’t storing any information, nor will the roar button work. We have no actual eggheads yet… That is where objects come in.

Objects

You may have noticed that I have been using the word thing to represent the actual thing (here eggheads) that we are representing with the class. This is to avoid using the word object, which has its own special meaning, in, you guessed it, object-oriented programming. If we want to actually use our class, we need to make an instance. That just means filling in the relevant details about the specific egghead we want to store. This instance is called an object.

Let’s imagine we want to store a representation of Ada in our program. We would take an instance of the Egghead class and fill in their details. The resulting object would represent Ada, whereas the class we started with represents all and any egghead that might ever exist. Below, you can see the objects for Ada and some of Ada’s friends; Alan and Edsger. We still visualise objects as boxes, just like classes, except now the gaps are all filled in.

Eggheads with values for the fields eg Ada Pink Red
Objects representing Ada, Alan and Edsger. Image by Daniel Gill for CS4FN

We (or a computer) could even take the given features of Alan and Edsger and generate an image of what they might look like. We have everything we need here to create something that looks and behaves like an egghead. This method of storing data means that a program can take whatever information it might want directly from the object. Likewise, it can do the equivalent of pressing the roar button and make each individual egghead roar.

Hiding the Details

Egghead with blue changed to orange
Trying to change Alan’s eye colour. Image by Daniel Gill for CS4FN

One thing we should consider while making the class is the integrity of the data. In its current form, any other part of our program, or another program using our class, can directly edit the attributes stored. Another part of the program (perhaps representing a virtual world for a virtual egghead to live in) might accidentally change the eye colour attribute for Alan, for example. This wouldn’t change Alan’s actual eye colour (which couldn’t happen anyway!), so our data would then be wrong. We can’t have that!

We can fix this by hiding the eye colour from the rest of the program, so it is stored within the object, but not accessible outside of it. But we still need a way for the program to read it: for this we use a button in our picture of the Egghead class. The existence of the eye colour attribute can then only be seen by other parts of the program by a procedure that gets the eye colour. No similar procedure is given for changing the eye colour, so there is no way to do it by mistake. Let’s build this new version of our class.

Sequence as values change
(a) Our new class, (b) An object representing Edsger, with eye colour hidden, (c) Pressing GetEyes gives us the eye colour. Image by Daniel Gill for CS4FN

This concept of hiding details is sometimes called encapsulation or information hiding, but computer scientists disagree about what these terms refer to exactly. Encapsulation is broader in its meanings, whereas information hiding is closer to what we are trying to do here. This video by ArjanCodes (see below) explains this distinction further.

We could change our class to include this concept for the name and hair colour, too. Whilst it is entirely possible for these attributes to change, it turns out that it is a good idea to hide them too: so hide name and use SetName and GetName buttons. That allows us to control the type of data we have going into that attribute (for example, checking the given name isn’t a number, which as all egghead names are made of letters would be a mistake).

Where next?

Now we have a class that represents all eggheads, we can store the details of any new egghead efficiently and safely. Hold on… some last-minute breaking news: scientists have found a new sub-species of egghead they are calling a rainbow egghead. All rainbow eggheads have rainbow hair, and a unique roar. Next time, we’ll use the concept of inheritance to give a more efficient way to write programs that store information about eggheads.

Daniel Gill, Queen Mary University of London

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Ethics – What would you do?

Signs pointing RIGHT to right and WRONG to the left
Right / Wrong image by Tumisu from Pixabay

You often hear about unethical behaviours, be it in politicians or popstars, but getting to grips with ethics, which deals with issues about what behaviours are right and wrong, is an important part of computer science too. Find out about it and at the same time try our ethical puzzle below and learn something about your own ethics…

Is that legal?

Ethics are about the customs and beliefs that a society has about the way people should be treated. These beliefs can be different in different countries, sometimes even between different regions of the same country, which is why it’s always important to know something about the local area when going on holiday. You don’t want to upset the local folk. Ethics tend to form the basis of countries’ laws and regulations, combining general agreement with practicality. Sticking your tongue out may be rude and so unethical, but the police have better things to do than arrest every rude school kid. Similarly, slavery was once legal, but was it ever ethical? Laws and ethics also have other differences; individuals tend to judge unethical behaviour, and shun those who behave inappropriately, while countries judge illegal behaviour – using a legal system of courts, judges and juries to enforce laws with penalties.

Dilemmas, what to do?

Now imagine you have the opportunity to go treading on the ethical and legal toes of people across the world from the PC in your home. Suddenly the geographical barriers that once separated us vanish. The power of computer science, like any technology, can be used for good or evil. What is important is that those who use it understand the consequences of their actions, and choose to act legally and ethically. Understanding legal requirements, for example contracts, computer misuse and data protection are important parts of a computer scientist’s training, but can you learn to be ethical?

Computer scientists study ethics to help them prepare for situations where they have to make decisions. This is often done by considering ethical dilemmas. These are a bit like the computer science equivalent of soap opera plots. You have a difficult problem, a dilemma, and have to make a choice. You suddenly discover you have a unknown long lost sister living on the other side of the Square, do you make contact or not, (on TV this choice is normally followed by a drum roll as the episode ends).

Give it a go

Here is your chance to try an ethical dilemma for yourself. Read the alternatives and choose what you would do in this situation. Then click on the poll choice. Like all good ‘personality tests’ you find out something about yourself: in this case which type of ethical approach you have in the situation according to some famous philosophers. There are also some fascinating facts to impress your mates. We’ll share the answers tomorrow.

Your Dilemma and your ethical personality

You are working for a company who are about to launch a new computer game. The adverts have gone out, the newspapers and TV are ready for the launch … then the day before you are told that there is a bug, a mistake, in the software. It means players sometimes can’t kill the dragon at the end of the game. If you hit the problem the only solution is to start the final level again. It can be fixed they think but it will take about a week or so to track it down. The computer code is hard to fix as it’s been written by 10 different people and 5 of them have gone on a back-packing holiday so can’t be contacted.

Peter McOwan, Queen Mary University of London

What the answers mean about you at the end!

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The answers

If you picked Option 1

1) Go ahead and launch. After all, there are still plenty of parts to the game that do work and are fun, there will always be some errors, and for this game in particular thousands have been signing up for text alerts to tell them when it’s launched. It will make many thousands happy.

That means you follow an ethical approach called ‘Act utilitarianism’.

Act Happy

The main principle of this theory, put forward by philosopher John Stuart Mill, is to create the most happiness (another name for happiness here is utility thus utilitarianism). For each situation you behave (act) in a way that increases the happiness of the largest number of people, and this is how you decide what is wrong or right. You may take different actions in similar situations. So you choose to launch a flawed game if you know that you have pre-sales of a hundred thousand, but another time decide to not launch a different flawed game where there are only one thousand pre-sales, as you wont be making so many people unhappy. It’s about considering the utility for each action you take. There is no hard and fast rule.

If you picked Option 2

2) Cancel the launch until the game is fixed properly, no one should have to buy a game that doesn’t work 100 per cent.

That means you follow an ethical approach called ‘Duty Theory’

Do your Duty

Duty theories are based on the idea of there being universal principles, such as ‘you should never ever lie, whatever the circumstances’. This is also known as the dentological approach to ethics (philosophers like to bring in long words to make simple things sound complicated!). The German philosopher Emanuel Kant was one of the main players in this field. His ‘Categorical Imperative’ (like I said long words…) said “only act in a way that you would want everyone else to act” (…simple idea!). So if you don’t think there should ever be mistakes in software then don’t make any yourself. This can be quite tough!

If you picked Option 3

3) Go ahead and launch. After all it’s almost totally working and the customers are looking forward to it. There will always be some errors in programs: it’s part of the way complicated software is, and a delay to game releases leads to disappointment.

You would be following the approach called ‘Rule utilitarianism’.

Spread a little happiness

Say something nice to everyone you meet today…it will drive them crazy

The main principle of this flavour of utilitarianism theory, put forward by philosopher Jeremy Bentham, is to create the most happiness (happiness here is called utility thus utilitarianism). You follow general rules that increase the happiness of the largest number of people, and this is how you decide what’s wrong or right. So in our dilemma the rule could be ‘even if the game isn’t 100% correct, people are looking forward to it and we can’t disappoint them’. Here the rule increases happiness, and we apply it again in the future if the same situation occurs.

Collaborative community coding & curating

Equality, diversity and inclusion in the R Project

Concentric Rings of rainbow people as triangles holding hands
Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

You might not think of a programming language like Python or Scratch as being an ‘ecosystem’ but each language has its own community of people who create and improve its code (compilers, library code,…), flush out the bugs, introduce new features, document any changes and write the ‘how to’ guides for new users. 

R is one such programming language. It’s named after its two co-inventors (Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman) and is used by around two million people around the world. People working in all sorts of jobs and industries (for example finance, academic research, government, data journalists) use R to analyse their data. The software has useful tools to help people see patterns in their data and to make sense of that information. 

It’s also open source which means that anyone can use it and help to improve it, a bit like Wikipedia where anyone can edit an article or write a new one. That’s generally a good thing because it means everyone can contribute but it can also bring problems. Imagine writing an essay about an event at your school and sharing it with your class. Then imagine your classmates adding paragraphs of their own about the event, or even about different events. Your essay could soon become rather messy and you’d need to re-order things, take bits out and make sure people hadn’t repeated something that someone had already said (but in a slightly different way). 

When changes are made to software people also want to keep a note not just of the ‘words’ added (the code) but also to make a note of who added what and when. Keeping good records, also known as documentation, helps keep things tidy and gives the community confidence that the software is being properly looked after.

Code and documentation can easily become a bit chaotic when created by different people in the community so there needs to be a core group of people keeping things in order. Fortunately there is – the ‘R Core Team’, but these days its membership doesn’t really reflect the community of R users around the world. R was first used in universities, particularly by more privileged statistics professors from European countries and North America (the Global North), and so R’s development tended to be more in line with their academic interests. R needs input and ideas from a more diverse group of active developers and decision-makers, in academia and beyond to ensure that the voices of minoritised groups are included. Also the voices of younger people, particularly as many of the current core group are approaching retirement age.

Dr Heather Turner from the University of Warwick is helping to increase the diversity of those who develop and maintain the R programming language and she’s been given funding by the EPSRC* to work on this. Her project is a nice example of someone who is bringing together two different areas in her work. She is mixing software development (tech skills) with community management (people skills) to support a range of colleagues who use R and might want to contribute to developing it in future, but perhaps don’t feel confident to do so yet. 

Development can involve things like fixing bugs, helping to improve the behaviour or efficiency of programs or translating error messages that currently appear on-screen in the English language into different languages. Heather and her colleagues are working with the R community to create a more welcoming environment for ‘newbies’ that encourages participation, particularly from people who are in the community but who are not currently represented or under-represented by the core group and she’s working collaboratively with other community organisations such as R-Ladies, LatinR and RainbowR. Another task she’s involved in is producing an easier-to-follow ‘How to develop R’ guide.

There are also people who work in universities but who aren’t academics (they don’t teach or do research but do other important jobs that help keep things running well) and some of them use R too and can contribute to its development. However their contributions have been less likely to get the proper recognition or career rewards compared with those made by academics, which is a little unfair. That’s largely because of the way the academic system is set up. 

Generally it’s academics who apply for funding to do new research, they do the research and then publish papers in academic journals on the research that they’ve done and these publications are evidence of their work. But the important work that supporting staff do in maintaining the software isn’t classified as new research so doesn’t generally make it into the journals, so their contribution can get left out. They also don’t necessarily get the same career support or mentoring for their development work. This can make people feel a bit sidelined or discouraged. 

To try and fix this and to make things fairer the Society of Research Software Engineering was created to champion a new type of job in computing – the Research Software Engineer (RSE). These are people whose job is to develop and maintain (engineer) the software that is used by academic researchers (sometimes in R, sometimes in other languages). The society wants to raise awareness of the role and to build a community around it. You can find out what’s needed to become an RSE below. 

Heather is in a great position to help here too, as she has a foot in each camp – she’s both an Academic and a Research Software Engineer. She’s helping to establish RSEs as an important role in universities while also expanding the diversity of people involved in developing R further, for its long-term sustainability.

Further reading

Related careers

QMUL

Below is an example of a Research Software Engineer role which was advertised at QMUL in April 2024 – you can read the original advert and see a copy of the job description / person specification information which is archived at the “Jobs in Computer Science” website. This advert was looking for an RSE to support a research project “at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and multi-modal Machine Learning, with applications in mental health.”

Closed, QMUL, Research Software Engineer (0.5FTE), ~£63.6k pro rata, closed April 2024

QMUL also has a team of Research Software Engineers and you can read about what they’re working on and their career here (there are also RSEs attached to different projects across the university, as above).

Archived job adverts from elsewhere

Below are some examples of RSE jobs (these particular vacancies have now closed but you can read about what they were looking for and see if that sort of thing might interest you in the future). The links will take you to a page with the original job advert + any Job Description (JD – what the person would actually be doing) and might also include a Person Specification (PS – the type of person they’re looking for in terms of skills, qualifications and experience) – collectively these are often known as ‘job packs’.

Note that these documents are written for quite a technical audience – the people who’d apply for the jobs will have studied computer science for many years and will be familiar with how computing skills can be applied to different subjects.

1. The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) wanted four Research Software Engineers (who’d be working either in Warrington or Oxford) on a chemistry-related project (‘computational chemistry’ – “a branch of chemistry that uses computer simulation to assist in solving chemical problems”) 

2. The University of Cambridge was looking for a Research Software Engineer to work in the area of climate science – “Computational modelling is at the core of climate science, where complex models of earth systems are a routine part of the scientific process, but this comes with challenges…”

3. University College London (UCL) wanted a Research Software Engineer to work in the area of neuroscience (studying how the brain works, in this case by analysing the data from scientists using advanced microscopy).

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CS4FN Advent Calendar – Day 25 bonus Christmas crackers: have you ever seen this cracker joke?

If you’re pulling a Christmas cracker today look out for this now famous but fairly puzzling ‘joke’ –

Q: What kind of cough medicine does Dracula take?
A: Con medicine

Apart from the fact that the joke is more suited to Hallowe’en (I wonder when someone will invent Hallowe’en crackers!) ‘con medicine’ doesn’t make any sense as an answer. Over the years lots of people found this joke in their cracker then posted a photograph on social media asking if anyone got the joke and could explain it.

From 2015

From 2016
Still baffling folk in 2018…

An explanation from Andrew Taylor seems to have solved the mystery. The answer is probably coffin medicine (though even then it’s still not a particularly great joke, in keeping with the traditions of Christmas cracker jokes). Where has the ‘ffi‘ gone though? Read Andrew’s 2018 blog post ‘Con Medicine‘ to find out how a typographical quirk in the way some fonts / typefaces display those letters probably resulted in a simple error in printing.

Perhaps the error has been fixed and no-one will find it in their crackers this year!

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EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1.